# A layout for community projects

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-layout-for-community-projects/170000
**Category:** Community Building
**Created:** [November 13, 2020, 3:09am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-layout-for-community-projects/170000 "2020-11-13T03:09:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 5

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### Author: ![angus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/angus/32/341715_2.png) [@angus](https://meta.discourse.org/u/angus)
#### Post date: [November 16, 2020, 1:12am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-layout-for-community-projects/170000/5 "2020-11-16T01:12:00Z")

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Nice!

That’s quite close to how we use Discourse to manage projects at [Pavilion](https://thepavilion.io). We use

1. [Assign](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-assign/58044) for assignments
2. [Discourse Event](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-event/149964) for events
3. Closing topics to indicate completion
4. Categories for “teams” (e.g. each client of ours gets their own private category and group)
5. Tags to distinguish “projects” from “tasks”

We also use our [Layouts Plugin](https://meta.discourse.org/t/custom-layouts-plugin/55208) and [Layouts Category List Widget](https://thepavilion.io/t/category-list-widget/3210) for our sidebar 🙂

 ![Screen Shot 2020-11-16 at 12.01.05 PM](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/3/5/355e6b45dbf9319c245dd5eac004ee66989591dc.jpeg)

> [@manuel](#):
>
> I’m only using the sidebar on desktop view, not mobile

I’m curious why you chose not to use the mobile layouts view?

> [@manuel](#):
>
> I’m only using the sidebar on desktop view, not mobile, that’s why I show categories in the top navigation as well. Also, there might be more categories that I wouldn’t want to give a similar spotlight on the sidebar menu.

We’ve chosen to hide the categories dropdown entirely (in a theme component). I’m curious if you’ve made any tweaks to the Category List Widget to select specific categories? Or if you’re using the `excluded_categories` setting? I considered added an `included_categories` setting (or something like that), as that might be useful to some people.

I actually recently enabled 3 tiers of categories on [thepavilion.io](http://thepavilion.io) to allow for a different knowledge base organisation. We’ve previously had

```plaintext
knowledge
  layouts
  custom-wizard
  category-highlighter

```

We’ve now moved to

```plaintext
knowledge
  plugins
    layouts
    custom-wizard
  themes
    category-highlighter

```

I resisted making this move for some time, as three tiers is more complicated, particularly for plugins and themes to handle. For example the layouts category list widget didn’t support 3 tiers (I just recently added support).

However, we now need three tiers in the knowledge-base for organisational reasons (e.g. we need to pull certain knowledge topics from the api on a category basis). As might be expected in a project / work based discourse the categorisation can be influenced by organisational needs, as opposed to discussion themes in a more discussion-focused forum.

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