Yehuda Falk's book (previously mentioned here) points out that subjects often are discourse topics, and discourse topics often are subjects. Without further defining what a discourse topic is, let us just go with some vague notion of what they are and come up with some ideas for a conlang:
Non-subject discourse topics can appear as null pronouns after prepositions; some syntactical positions have special prepositions (that can go elsewhere than the actual word-order-wise position of arguments that it stands in for) that only ever appear for discourse topics (or rather, there are adverbs that refer to the discourse topic that can stand in for NPs in certain positions)
Another thing one could do is to have mandatorily possessed nouns that have no explicitly stated possessor be assumed to belong to the discourse topic.
A third thing could be to weaken the link to subjects and strengthen the link to objects, and let any zero subject or zero object be parsed as referring to the discourse topic.
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