Our main screen looks very different with no top menu dropdowns, etc

Product Support

AI-generated summary

RichardTE noticed that their Discourse community’s main screen layout differs significantly from meta.Discourse.org, lacking top menu dropdowns like Categories and Tags. NateDhaliwal suggested the issue might be due to using the redditish theme, recommending checking the site’s top menu setting and trying different themes. RichardTE confirmed that the same theme was applied to meta.Discourse.org, which helped identify the cause. Others, including Lilly and Moin, advised using try.discourse.org for testing and safe mode to disable theme customizations. RichardTE also shared a resource page on meta.Discourse.org featuring a gallery of official and community themes, including Horizon, Material, and Sam’s Simple, as helpful options for new admins RichardTE, NateDhaliwal, Lilly, Moin, RichardTE.

1

I’ve been building my first Discourse community over the past couple weeks. It is amazing software and a lot to take in. Compared to the meta.Discourse.org layout, ours is very different and I can’t figure out what I’m missing.

Here’s a shot from meta.Discourse.org, taken just now.

shot of meta.Discourse.com from 2025 Sep.
shot of meta.Discourse.com from 2025 Sep.968×627 62.7 KB

And here’s ours. Posts are displayed in blocks and are not listed across the page. No top menu dropdowns, like Categories & Tags. There might be a simple fix for this, but I’m not finding it. Thanks in advance, and thanks for Discourse!

shot of our main screen, with no top menu dropdowns, etc.
shot of our main screen, with no top menu dropdowns, etc.1171×746 107 KB

And if there’s a way to switch between various main screen layouts, can individual Categories have their own layout?

2

I suspect that is your theme. The default Horizon theme has this (see try.discourse.org).

I think you may have to add Categories to the top menu site setting.

3

thx @NateDhaliwal

will check out what you said. I’m using redditish themes, dark & light, so may have to change. Pity because I was enjoying the look, but not so much the layout.

4

I wrote the post last night. This morning I opened up meta.Discourse.org (this forum) and the layout looked the same as our own Discourse site. This confused me until I realized that I had meta set to the redditish theme, same as on our own!

Lesson here is that for first-timers like me, and others, if you are experiencing layout issues, check out this here meta.Discourse.org forum, and instantly swap in the various themes like Horizon, Material, redditish, and Sam’s Simple (from selector at lower right). You’ll get new ideas and you can confirm if your troubles are coming from the theme or not.
Thanks again to @NateDhaliwal & all!

5

like Nate said, you can also have a look and try the features at try.discourse.org too. Good luck.

6

You can also disable the customization by themes in your forum with safe mode

7

Thanks for the feedback. This forum has another good resource page for themes, a visual gallery of more than 20 Discourse themes, each of which links out to demo and Github pages: Theme - Discourse Meta

Several are identified as “Official“ themes — “maintained by the Discourse team”. These could be a good choice for admins just starting out with Discourse.

“Official” themes include: Air, Avid Reader, Discourse Classic, Fakebook, Fully, Ghost, Graceful, Horizon, Material Design, Minima, Mint, Sam’s Simple, Sublime, Zeronoise.