I looked in the linked topic and don’t really see clearly where automatic generation of a table of contents is covered.
I’m documenting some best practices for some communications our org does which currently lean heavily on Google Docs and benefit from Google Docs built-in ToC generation feature.
There may be an opportunity to move these to Discourse in the future, which would provide a number of other benefits (tagging, better discussion, linking between topics, bumping older topics).
Copy/paste from Google Docs to Discourse works so well now, that I anticipate that will also reduce the switching cost. And for this and many other use cases, I’m already starting to find places where suggesting the workflow, “Author you topic in Google Docs, then paste it into Discourse” makes a lot of sense.
But these docs are sometimes lengthy and it may be hard to let go of the easy ToC creation.
I think that few communities create long enough posts that a toc would be useful. This seems like a plugin that quite a few communities could use, though. It would need settings to determine what level of headers should be included in the toc.
I agree. I wouldn’t want these showing up in every post without some explicit action.
Sorry, I don’t, beyond what our org currently pays Discourse annually for enterprise hosting.
But I’ll also just continue to participate here as a normal user, hopefully sharing a worthwhile perspective that can help the community gain insights into what things may be valuable to add to the product independently.
This is an interesting approach and I like it! If this functionality were made available we would certainly use it in my community. The [toc] short code is one of the few things I miss from drupal.
I am in the process of moving our operating procedures into wikis in discourse and it’s working quite well. The workaround to no automatic table of contents is to use the details markdown, which lets me tidily display a series of steps and lots of structured information without making the post so long it takes loads of scrolling to get to what you need. I also put some stuff in the second and third post in a topic to separate it for easy access.
(Maybe this topic needs a more detailed title to distinguish it from the other one, or they can be merged?)
On reflection, I’d love this more. Just adapted the Discourse New User Guide for one of my own sites and manually having to edit all the links was a pain (but of course I appreciated the head start) and there’s a potential for mistakes.