I am currently working on an overhaul of our current docs solution, to move us over to using doc categories instead of the docs plugin. I’m currently testing on our dev instance and have run into a little hiccup. I created the index, and listed the topics by URL, without a title. The sidebar looked correct, pulling in the topic titles. [image] Then, I wanted to check the behavior of re-ordering the items in the sidebar, so I edited the order of the items in the second section. After I saved the edit, the sidebar titles changed to the URL instead of pulling in the correct titles. [image] I tried rebuilding the HTML as indicated in Sidebar item title not updated after linked topic title in Index is edited, but that did not fix the issue. I also tried removing the index from the category settings, saving, and adding it again, and that didn’t help either. The topic I linked above indicated that [image]Sidebar item title not updated after linked topic title in Index is edited Rebuilding the HTML is necessary on this case. It should update right after that, but there may be some caching going on. My question is - how long should it take to sort out if caching is the issue? Would it be better to include the titles in the index from the jump? Or could this be a different issue altogether?

Thanks for writing in and your detailed report. I don’t think this is a caching issue as the sidebar has changed. The cache should be properly busted once the topic is edited. Are you self-hosted or hosted by Discourse? I suspect the issue could be how the plugin does URL resolution using the base URLs. :thinking:

[image] nat: Are you self-hosted or hosted by Discourse? Thanks for the quick reply! We are self-hosted.

The bug is probably not to do with the base URL like I thought, but probably related to topic URL resolution. I’ve a fix here https://github.com/discourse/discourse-doc-categories/pull/68

Doc Categories - Sidebar titles revert to URL when editing index

Product Support

tvavrda (Tomas Vavrda) November 17, 2025, 11:47am 3

I have the same problem – self hosted (just updated to the latest). Having a simple link in the index is not enough. I have to give it a label to make it working – either label: link or [label](link).

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Doc Categories - Sidebar titles revert to URL when editing index

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