Hide Topic Navigation With Timeline

A B C
:information_source: Summary Hides the Topic Navigation With Timeline.
:eyeglasses: Preview How can I include a link for users to preview this on theme-creator.discourse.org?
:hammer_and_wrench: Repository https://github.com/denvergeeks/discourse-hide-topic-navigation-with-timeline
:question: Install Guide How to install a theme or theme component
:open_book: New to Discourse Themes? Beginner’s guide to using Discourse Themes

Install this theme component

What This Does

Hides the Topic Navigation With Timeline while also widening the corresponding Topic content area.

Screenshots

Before:

After:

3 Likes

Should this be in the theme-component category?

Seems like it. I tried that but was denied permissions… I just assumed a moderator would review and move it there if warranted.

The closest direction I could find was this (I would appreciate a better direction if there is one documented somewhere!)…

You have to join the @theme_authors group first. :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes

Ahh @dodesz – Good to know. I have now done this. Thank you!

2 Likes

I’ve moved it across, but just as an FYI there’s a topic template when you use the theme-component category which suggests a layout for the OP. :+1: If you could check it out and match this one up it would be brilliant. :slight_smile:

Wiil do, thank you!

1 Like

Out of curiosity, wouldn’t hiding the timeline make navigating topics more difficult? What’s the purpose of it?

1 Like

IDK but if it hides this on mobiles I will use it right away :wink:

@Jagster

#topic-progress-wrapper {
    display: none;
}

I can roll this up into a Theme Component if you’d like.

Or, if you’re using the Default Theme you can paste that snippet into that theme’s built-in custom.css override area:

First…

Then…

Note:

The advantages of this (or any other such little CSS Tweak) made into a Theme Component are:

  1. It becomes and remains freely accessible to everyone directly through their Discourse site’s admin settings panel, including immediate access to updates, and bug fixes, and public bug reports by anyone.

  2. Admins can apply the component selectively, for some themes enabled on their site, but not others, for any particular use case. This is very useful IMO because the Default Theme is now the only theme that provides that built-in custom.css override area shown in the images above (which all themes used to have, but no longer do.)

And by the way, you can use Github directly and entirely through the web interface on Github.com to make and deploy Themes and Theme Components. This is how my nOObish self does it.

I could show people how, if there is interest.

1 Like

Thank you for asking @Canapin

This Theme Component is part of a suite of components I’ve started making for my own project (and in order to provide for the community, in case others might want it).

The project is to provide a more surgical approach to site customization, using a subtractive (rather than the more conventional additive) process.

You see, I’ve developed themes and provided support for the Ghost CMS community in the Developers’ Forum there for several years.

That community uses Discourse for it’s development and support platform, and that is how I became familiar with Discourse.

The elegant simplicity of Ghost as a blogging and (more recently) a full-blown publishing platform was a breath of fresh air for me after years of developing sites in Drupal and Wordpress.

Over time I wanted more and more functionality out of Ghost, and the platform itself and the friendly community there made that simple for me, in large part because of the Discourse forum there.

As I became more proficient at using Discourse in the Ghost community, I sort of fell in love with it, and over the last couple years I’ve sort of switched my daily online “home base” over here to Discourse. Mainly because I sort of outgrew the Ghost platform as a theme developer, and wanted more “out-of-the-box” functionality readily available to me “under the hood”. Also, the community there is much smaller, and evolution is naturally slower and more cumbersome.

Ghost’s features and interfaces are, by design, very minimal and highly focused in scope, and relatively limited in access through it’s provided user and admin interfaces. If I want or need to extend the features beyond what is provided “out-of-the-box”, I need to build it myself (largely without community support) and then figure out how to plug it in as an external component. For me, the learning curves in this approach became not worth it.

This is where Discourse came into stark contrast for me. I experience Discourse, as a platform tool set, on the opposite side of the spectrum from Ghost. It is more mature, with a larger community that moves faster and more efficiently.

It seems that Discourse already has, built in “out-of-the-box” all of the features that I came to want or to need in Ghost (as well as what my clients are increasingly asking for), along with an even more awesome community!

Discourse has matured so far beyond a forum software and, while the core forum functionality is absolutely far and away the best-in-class, I see Discourse as a toolbox (actually more like a Home Depot) for building customized platforms and applications and new types of online social spaces.

I’ve always pushed and pulled and stretched the various platforms I’ve use in site-building. As an insatiable daily learner and happy nOObish warrior, I seek to learn and master and conquer. It is what gets me up every morning and brings me joy throughout each day.

In this regard, I feel so many kindred spirits in this community, as I do in all open-source communities.

Wait, what was your original question?

Oh yeah…

Lately I’ve been experimenting with building a simplified blogging platform using Discourse. I was going to build it as it’s own Theme, and I think I still will. But I’ve decided to break up the work into smaller bites (Theme Components) which could also be selectively applied to any existing themes.

I think a great deal of this can be accomplished by simply, selectively subtracting things (through CSS-hiding Theme Components, and possibly other methods I have yet to learn.)

So, in answer to your question, this Theme Component is one example of a Theme Component in that larger suite I’ve begun working on.

Possibly dumb question… But how do you navigate a topic without it?

Possibly dumb answer… am I missing something (I always could be) but… you just scroll down and up the page like… normal (?)

(Is this a trick question?)
confused randy marsh GIF by South Park

I was thinking of big topics where the amount of posts is bigger than the browser scroll bar can see in one go (say you enter on post 25 out of 150). That’d be a bit of scrolling and loading to get to the end.

Yes that is so very true, and is really why the Timeline is such a neat and unique (and, as you said essential) component of Discourse as a robust forum platform.

But, for example, if (by design) a site mainly serves articles or blog posts, those types of sites (often by small or self-publishers) aren’t expecting lots of replies and conversations (and may not want to manage and moderate conversations ongoing). Those articles or blog posts are often timely and meant to have a short shelf life.

Discourse can easily be a superior platform even for those more simple sites like blogs and publications. For all of the reasons we know and love Discourse with it’s robust feature sets which can be initially turned off while not needed, but are always ready to be turned on when needed, without creating a Frankenstein monster site with a bunch of third-party plugins, hacks and add-ons.

I use my nOObish.me Discourse site as one of my blogs. I have posting replies/comments disabled. As a result, I don’t need the Timeline, and I can easily hide it with just a tiny bit of CSS.

When I use a Table of Contents on a Topic/Blog Post it uses that otherwise empty block of white space on the right side of my Post. But if I don’t use a TOC I think that empty white space seems odd. I think I should be able to selectively remove it in the Composer (to reclaim that empty space to widen the content of my Topic post) and I can do that selectively, per Topic, using this method.

there was a settings sign that showed some moderation authorizations.

now it is gone. how do I do moderation operations such as deleting topics? is there a way to bring that setting part back?

Here is another instance of the same button at the bottom of the Topic!

1 Like