This guide covers how to use the Page Publishing feature on Discourse. This feature allows Staff/Admin users to convert a topic into a standalone static page with custom styling. Examples include the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages.
Required user level: Admin
Publishing static pages on Discourse
Page Publishing allows Admin users to create standalone static pages from topics. This is similar to the process for creating Terms of Service or Privacy Policy pages.
Summary
This documentation will cover:
Enabling Page Publishing
Publishing a topic as a page
Unpublishing a topic
Common issues and solutions
FAQs
Additional resources
Enabling Page Publishing
Navigate to Admin > Settings.
Activate the enable page publishing setting.
Enabling page publishing when login is required
To allow published pages to be visible even when a user is not logged in:
Activate the show_published_pages_login_required setting at Admin > Settings.
Publishing a Topic
Go to the first post of a public topic and select the ellipsis icon (...).
I still need to try this out first hand so the following may not be grounded in reality, but:
It strikes me that this permission model sets up a scenario where you always see two copies of the pagesā content ā one in the relevant Discourse category, and one in the published pages themselves. This of course seems duplicative if youāre wanting to publish pages for the general population that is similar to, or identical to, your Discourse user base.
OTOH, if pages had the āworld readableā flag available, you could then restrict who can see/edit them to a small group, and the only place the content would be available to other Discourse users would be in the published links themselves.
(Iām thinking of a use case of a ādocumentation siteā here.)
Otherwise, Iām pretty excited to test things out!
Awesome stuff, and thanks again for listening to your users. I love the ālets make this better for us allā vibe that Discourse has! Weāll make heavy use of this.
When discussing one use (patching up an install that went a bit awry), another user pointed out a remaining bit of icing that could do with going on the cake:
Hey, is there any way to include the ability to make /faq and /about public as well, as they are currently hidden in Login Required sites. We can of course use the existing functionality that youāve just released for /faq by making our own, changing the link in settings, and explicitly linking to it. However, this is not pretty and the existing navigation to it remains hidden. We canāt do that at all for /about of course.
Please excuse my ignorance, as I am very much a beginner in the HTML/CSS spaceā¦ however, how would we go about applying our theme colour choices to published pages. At its simplest, Iād like to use the dark background/white text to give the published pages the same darkmode experience as accessing our forums.
Is this already in the product, or do I need to play with HTML/CSS? If the latter, could anyone give me some pointers in the right direction? Thanks!
Can you make this a separate feature request please? This is not related to page publishing, as in I wouldnāt have to change anything related to page publishing to make it possible. I do agree it would be better if all these āstaticā pages could have more or less the same behaviour, but there are multiple solutions here (do nothing? add site settings? migrate these to page publishing?), so we might want to have a dedicated topic for this.
Just trying to think of a solution hereā¦ would it work if type="text/javascript" and type="text/discourse-plugin" were treated differently? The API needs the latter, right?
I think whatās needed is a set of theme components that add such. The last client I had to use this wanted the topic creator removed. I think itās hard to guess what will meet peopleās needs for this!
Are there currently any ongoing efforts for adding āsimpleā (non-API) Javascript support to published pages? Or should we forget about this near- to mid-term ?
Can i display external non-Discourse JSON on this page? Because we canāt use php code here and discourse strip most of html so i do not know how to do itā¦
I have a problem with a published page - the button to copy the content of the code block is not visible on a published page. Screenshot: Screenshot by Lightshot. I move the mouse over the block, but the button doesnāt appear. When logged in - everything works as usual - ok.
Ha! So it seems that thereās a hacky way to make some theme components work with page publishing.
Iām looking into adding some header/footer to the published pages, and theme components seem to be the way to go. But it seems bad to go on and implement something that would potentially break in the near future.
@riking, it looks like the text/javacript type in header or footer working on published pages was unintented. Is it going to be fixed or used to extend published pages?
Unfortunately, the āPage Publishingā feature doesnāt meet my needs. For me to use it, I would need published pages:
to be displayed within the normal Discourse layout, i.e. with the standard Discourse header (just like the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy), and
to be rendered like normal (decorated) topics, i.e. supporting bbcode and plugins.
In the meantime I used the default Discourse customization facility:
Identify the added element, e.g., with a published-page-footer-links CSS class.
Customize CSS to hide this element by default and show it only for published pages
Add the element in the Footer space
2. In CSS, add:
/* Only show footer links on published pages */
.published-page-footer-links { display: none; }
.published-page .published-page-footer-links { display: block;}
3. in Footer, add:
<nav class="published-page-footer-links">
Hi there! This is the footer for published pages!
</nav>
This guide covers how to use the Page Publishing feature on Discourse. This feature allows Staff/Admin users to convert a topic into a standalone static page with custom styling. Examples include the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages.
Required user level: Admin
To allow page publishing, itās necessary to deactivate the secure upload site settings.
For hosted sites, secure uploads are limited to the Enterprise plan.
