Add long site description to about page

[tophee (Christoph)]

As discourse becomes more and more popular, I increasingly find myself teleported to sone discourse forum via some link. And one of the first things I usually want to know is: Where am I? What is this forum about? And unless the site admins have done an exceptionally good job in formulating the essence of their site in a single sentence in site description (which is shown on the About page), it’s often not that easy to really understand what that forum is about.

How about adding a long site description field to the site settings and show it on the About page?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@tophee

And unless the site admins have done an exceptionally good job in formulating the essence of their site in a single sentence in site description (which is shown on the About page), it’s often not that easy to really understand what that forum is about.

So your argument is that a second, even longer field… will somehow get filled out, when the shorter, already existing field does not?

[tophee (Christoph)]

@codinghorror

So your argument is that a second, even longer field… will somehow get filled out, when the shorter, already existing field does not?

LOL, well, what I had in mind was not so much that the site description doesn’t get filled out (in my experience it usually does) but that it’s shortness is often not enough to convey what the forum really is about, especially when it’s something innovative/uncommon. For two reasons:

1. It requires some thinking to boil down the essence of your seite into one sentence.
2. If the site owner comes up with something decent, chances are that it’s more of a slogan than an actual description.

But even if the problem were that the short field doesn’t get filled out (or in a useless way), I would indeed think that there is at least a chance that the long field would get filled out. It’s so much easier to describe your seite in many words than to come up with an elevator pitch.

[ssvenn]

Any chance of getting the site description field to support HTML or at least weblinks? I figured the description on the about page would be a good place to link my users back to meta.discourse.org if they’re curious about the software

I’ll stick the link on the FAQ page for now. I think the nicest long term solution would probably be to add a similar “About” topic to the Staff category of new installations and insert the text into a section of the About page, the same way it’s done with the FAQ, TOS and Privacy Policy system-created topics.

[Noba]

When i add this script to the </head> section of the themes, the terms of service hyperlink seems to break and appear as this:

It happens to all themes.
Do you know how i could fix this?

[Johani (Joe)]

Welcome to meta @Noba

The reason this happens is because the example is a bit old now. The template has changed in Discourse and so the snippet in my post is outdated (because it was based on the old template)

This is the main reason why we don’t recommend full template overrides, they require maintenance.

I’ve deleted the old post to prevent any further confusion about this.

The good news is that one of the changes made to that template recently introduces a new plugin-outlet that serves the same purpose.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/5cf63e43c6d0bcf604cccc9d967cf393afc1bbcd#diff-6c77bec15b126dd8be1340fde30898d0

What that means is that you can now inject a long description without having to do a full template override.

So if the starting point is this:

You can then use something like this to add a long description (in the header tab of your theme)

<script type="text/x-handlebars" data-template-name="/connectors/about-after-description/long-description">

  Your text/markup goes here..

</script>

So for example here I added a couple of new paragraphs

You’ll notice two problems:

1. the old short description is still visible
2. there’s a lot space between our new content and the content that already exists on the page

We can fix both of these with a bit of CSS

.about-page {
  section.about {
    margin-bottom: 0;
    p {
      display: none;
    }
  }
  .about-after-description-outlet {
    margin-bottom: 40px;
  }
}

all of the above together should give you the same result as the old snippet

but will not require any maintenance because you leave the template alone and simply add to it instead of overriding the entire thing.

You can read more about how plugin-outlets work in themes here

[s123]

@Johani thanks for this solution but it remove contact details from about page. Please let me know how to fix it. thanks!

if I remove display: none; then it shows again but then there is gap and also shows site description.

[Steven]

Add &.description before p on line 4

.about-page {
  section.about {
    margin-bottom: 0;
    &.description p {
      display: none;
    }
  }
  .about-after-description-outlet {
    margin-bottom: 40px;
  }
}

It will hide only the text in description instead of the all page

[s123]

@Steven, thats great! it is working now. Many thanks!