I guess there probably is a theme or component that does this. I’d like the list of topics to include at least the start of the topic text, facebook-like (ideally with a button to expand and display the whole topics inline) – or that simply includes the whole topic text directly. I think this will be really helpful for my members who will be coming from facebook-world where there are no titles and you can read through multiple posts without having to click through anything, just scroll.
AI-generated summary
In a Support discussion titled Is there a way to display topic contents in category view?, stephtara seeks a Facebook-like interface where topic previews show full or expanded text without requiring clicks. Several users recommend plugins and themes: David_Ghost suggests Topic List Excerpt, Heliosurge points to Topic List Previews (TLP) and Topic Cards, and NateDhaliwal recommends the Fakebook theme. stephtara finds Fakebook unsuitable for desktop and visually-focused use cases, but later finds TLP promising, seeking to increase excerpt length 7. Heliosurge suggests customizing via GitHub code overrides, while Moin clarifies that excerpt length is controlled by core site settings — themes can’t change this, but plugins like merefield’s can add custom settings. Heliosurge and Moin confirm this, with Moin linking to a TLP thread discussing excerpt length adjustments. A screenshot shared by Heliosurge illustrates a possible visual outcome. The discussion centers on balancing usability, performance, and customization to replicate Facebook-style scrolling previews in Discourse.
Hi, you have Topic list excerpt for this
There are a few ways
Tool me a bit but there is also this one that maybe if interest. Lots of CSS options posted in the topic.
I think this theme is quite good: it has both topic excerpts as well as a Facebook-like design:
I’ve tried Fakebook but it really doesn’t work out on desktop. It’s also skewed towards publications with visuals imho, which will not be the case for us. I really like the idea but it’s not “polished” enough to be usable for me :-/
Is it worth me giving more specific feedback regarding the issues?
Topic List Previews is a pretty good match, thanks! Just need to figure out how to get “enough excerpt” to show up, rather than just a few lines.
Review the code on GitHub. If you can identify the lines) of code related you can create a custom component and override it with your code. By adding ! important.
The author or another member might provide the snippet your looking for as well.
I think usually the excerpt length is based on the site setting in core. A theme cannot change which data is available. It can request additional data, but doing that for every user on every post shown in the topic list would add a lot of requests.
merefield’s plugin adds a separate setting because plugins can change what themes cannot.
So a site setting maybe?
