Currently to change the homepage of your Discourse site, you have to configure the site setting top menu and put your desired homepage as the first option in the list. This is a behavior that’s fairly unclear to new admins.
Today we’re merging a change that adds a new default homepage site setting to make this a clearer and easier process.
Existing sites won’t need to do anything, as the default for this new setting is first item in top menu which is the same functionality we’ve always had. The same options are present in the new setting as well. If you choose a homepage that is only available to logged-in users, like new, we’ll still fall back to the first top menu item available to anonymous visitors.
One change this new setting unlocks is that you can now have a homepage that isn’t present in the top menu. So for example, you can set categories as your homepage and remove that from the top menu setting, as the link to all categories is also available in the sidebar.
In the future we may add some new options for homepages, so keep an eye out for more updates!