A blank route for the top menu

[manuel (Manuel Kostka)]

The context for this request:

@awesomerobot

A very common situation you’ll find yourself in as a theme developer is the need to create a customization that only shows on the homepage of your community.

Indeed every customization I did for Discourse involved a custom homepage layout. The route choices for such a homepage are rather limited:

• the categories page
• the global latest list
• the global top list

The most common option in my experience was choosing the categories route and including the category overview on the homepage. With the sidebar as the new navigation menu, this choice became less attractive: It makes the “All categories” link direct to a homepage and operate differently than for example the “All tags” link right below. It could also require renaming that link or hiding it from it’s default location, as well adding inconsistency to the menu.

Additionally, communities now often prefer a very custom landing page. More of a community intro or a community hub experience. Choosing one of the list pages is not a good fit to build such a page.

I think it’s not that complicated adding a custom blank route as a plugin. But that could only be used on CDCK’s enterprise plan. Wouldn’t it be a helpful approach for customization to offer an optional blank route on the top menu?

So that route can be customized just using theme components and the homepage placeholder route.

[manuel (Manuel Kostka)]

The issues I’ve been running in here are also illustrating this:

Trying to show the footer on a custom landing page (using the top route)

We just launched a custom landing page where we don’t want to show any list of topics, only custom components. We use the global top route to build the landing page and set the actual list of top topics to display: none. It all works fine on staging, however, on production the footer doesn’t show on the landing page. At least I figured out what’s happening, it’s because of infinite loading not being resolved: on staging, there’s almost no top topics, so the list is already loaded even it’s n…