Add long site description to about page

ux
7

Welcome to meta @Noba :wave:

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 The template has changed in Discourse and so the snippet in my post is outdated (because it was based on the old template)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:

about1
about1771×399 17.8 KB

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

about2
about2999×614 66 KB

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

about3
about3985×555 62.7 KB

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

11 Likes