Hi all, so I know you have this great category structure and put a lot of thought into it. And I love it.
I’d love one additional feature here to group categories in a way that the groups could be collapsible hiding the categories underneath (i.e. “category bundles” or “category groups” or “category directories” or “category intersections”). I’d find that useful here on Meta actually.
What we want to do is things like:
Products (no topics belong here, this is purely for grouping. It is not a category! Perhaps permissions on this that cascade down might make sense for some.)
Product Category
Product Category
Product Category
Community
Category
Category
Category
Internal
Category
Category
Category
So on Meta it might work like so:
Support:
Dev
UX
Extensibility
Howto
Login
bug
feature
Installation
faq
Community:
Praise
Blog
Discourse hub
marketplace
hosting
meta
releases
This would allow more organization, easier finding of things, and for folks to focus on the general areas of their choice.
No, I don’t want tags. If you look at our forums - they have many categories. Some are about Products, some are about Community, and some are Internal. I want a way to group those “types” together with a heading between the groupings so they look separate and are easier to scan in our long list of categories.
Other forum software does this. So you can “section” each off on the homepage. Here’s an example at a CMS I’ve used in the past. The forums are fairly dead, that isn’t important to this conversation…
You’ll see how there is a “grouping” such as “Community Gathering” “ExpressionEngine 2”, “MojoMotor” etc. These each have categories with topics inside of the categories. It is a visual separation.
That top level that I posted isn’t a category - it’s a … grouping label. In any case, semantics aside (as another level of Categories would solve this) - is there anything at all like this coming down the line?
Your only other option is plugin. Write a plugin to take over the categories page and break it out however you want. It will be a bit of a pain to keep updated, but it is doable.
Those will be your problem areas. However, you can get around that partially. You could create a new model that returns that data that only your customization would use. It queries SQL and caches and so forth.
If you went that route, any changes by Discourse would likely not damage you too much (unless they move things deep down in Core that deal with how you query Topics, how you Cache results, etc.
You could then create a template/view that has the Groupings hard coded in the design and each section then puts their respective sub-categories and topics however you see fit. Technically you could create a view like latest under each category and limit it to the 10 recent topics (if you wanted).
Where you will run into pain points is if you want to reuse the categorries model that already exists or modify its templates directly. That bit us for a long while with our own theme and we’ve recently moved away from some of our customizations to get rid of that nightmare.
Anyway, this is more “food for thought” and a better explanation of what I meant by pain points.
@cpradio - I am very grateful to you for taking the time to write that up. I’ll bring it to our devs; from what I’m seeing this isn’t going to be worth the maintenance nightmare that would ensure.
I’m a little confused interpreting that screenshot today in 2017. Is that how it actually looked circa November 2015 (minus the red arrows)? Or is it entirely a mock-up?
I seem to remember it looking that way, with the 4 latest topics in each category. This was really important to my (stubborn, change-resistant ) users as the grouped topics made it similar to old forums.
Nowadays it seems the topics listed on the Categories page are no longer grouped by category, it’s just a latest-ordered list similar to the main page.
) users as the grouped topics made it similar to old forums.