This is what I’ve done for my community. It means when people search “How do I embed a video” for example, they get a topic which covers exactly that, and nothing more. If you don’t allow video on your site, then you can just omit such a topic. Additionallity they can just reply to this specific topic if they have an issue with it, documenting only issues which are related to that topic, instead of the mixture of topics a larger guide contains.
A second advantage of this, is that you can cross reference it in multiple larger guides, taking advantage of the oneboxing of other Discourse Topics.
Here’s an example of a Sailing Guide I have where the topics are broken down into separate topics but unified under a “main” guide. In this case, SBF SEE is s topic for one type of License. SBF Binnen is another topic(not seen here) which has exactly the same navigation information. So I maintain one Navigation topic, and link it into both Guides.
Sadly not everything renders well with the oneboxing, but it’s none the less a great way to combine topics, and create a single point of edit, that updates all topics which need to reference that same information.
Completely agree. I find having a Discourse Category better than a sidebar(although it could be accessable with a sidebar) simply because it encourages users to raise issues with the setup of the community, and admins to modify topics to better match their community. For example, replacing default images, with images that relate specifically to their platform.