martin announces that high context topic cards, previously introduced for the Horizon theme, are becoming the new default via an upcoming change. These cards display key signals like Solved status, Topic Voting, Assignments, tags, and excerpts, with an improved layout and typography. Site admins can enable this early at /admin/config/upcoming-changes, and new installations will get it automatically. Once stable, admins can still revert to simple topic cards via theme settings.
Community feedback varies. Kevin7 praises the theme as the best available. However, some users seek more flexibility. switschel requests category-level configuration, while maddy, an educator, prefers a compact view for monitoring many posts and asks for a toggle between compact and detailed views.
Regarding thumbnails, Doreen_Garris and Aurora ask how to add them to the topic listing. satonotdead initially suggests a topic excerpts AI gists component, but maddy declines due to privacy concerns. satonotdead clarifies the component has a compact view, but later provides a specific link to a discourse-horizon-topic-thumbnails component that directly addresses the users’ request for thumbnail support.
A few months ago we introduced Horizon: High Context Topic Cards for the Horizon theme. Now, using an upcoming change, we are making this the new default topic card style for Horizon.
As a quick recap, here is what high context topic cards expose in the topic list:
Upcoming change
You can enable this upcoming change early at /admin/config/upcoming-changes:
This upcoming change will only show if Horizon is the default theme for your site, or if it’s user-selectable. Brand new Discourse sites will also automatically get high context topic cards enabled, they will not see this upcoming change either.
When the upcoming change reaches Stable, we will remove it. Most sites will have transitioned to high context topic cards by then, but admins will still be able to switch back to simple topic cards with the “topic card high context” theme setting:
This is the best theme available on Discourse, I use it and I love it. I’ve added a few small customizations to it, which make it even more beautiful and modern. Thank you to the Discourse team for your hard work and for allowing us to create wonderful communities!
I really like this for exploring, but for my use case (educator), being able to see the status of many posts at once is much more ideal, and so I and others on my team prefer the compact view. It would be nice to be able to choose between compact and detailed from the feed imo.
Well, the theme component has a compact view that you can look into. That’s why I shared it, it will not solve your issue as is but could be helpful for your use-case.
