Allow users to star or favorite categories then list them at the top

[ccdw (Christopher W)]

@clay

What I propose is this:

allow users to “favorite” or “star” or “bookmark” categories of interest.
when they visit the categories or bookmarks page, those categories appear at the top of the list.

I’m in the process of implementing something similar - albeit using client side code rather than developing a plugin.

I’m starting with my Material Design skin mentioned here:

Material Design Experiments

Continuing the discussion from Client Side Hooks and Functions: We are in the process of skinning the categories pages of Discourse, see below. This is achieved with 50 lines or so of SCSS(CSS). You’ll notice the categories are packed together vertically. To achieve this we’ve used Packery and it works well - although to reiterate, the styling changes are all CSS. [image] The same CSS and code, albeit with a slightly different core selector, also works on individual category pages. Note tha…

1 - First, client side code adds a star to each category tile. The star in outline mode signifies the category is not a favourite.

2 - The user can then ‘favourite’ one or more categories by clicking on the appropriate stars - which then change to solid white. As each category is added, the view is re-sorted and the the favourites are moved to the top of the view.

3 - Once favourites have been selected, the user can optionally remove non favourites from the view by clicking the star top right of the page. This applies a filter to the view. (This functionality can easily be expanded to filter by additional attributes)

This is all working in my prototype although I have yet to persist the user's preferences to the server. I'm still reworking client side code so this may take some time to achieve. But in principle, this is a very light weight way to achieve what you need, at least on the category page. Once favourites are persisted, it shouldn't be difficult to retrieve them and sort and filter topic views using the same methodology.

In the short term, these preferences could be stored in a cookie, although clearly the above 1,2,3, process would need to be executed on every device the user uses to access the site.

Happy to share once this has been resolved.