Suppose I create a server of schools, will it be possible for schools to create different communities inside the discourse server. The school might have a profile picture, an about us, etc. Or this should be done using creating the schools as users?
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Welcome, @anonmyous-alien 
It depends on the goal you want to achieve and the purpose of your forum.
Is it for the schools’ owners? Teachers? Students?
What would the discussions be focused on?
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Actually I took the wrong analogy my apologies, a better one would be of NGO. So like each NGO shall have its own aim, purpose and funding that they received. And each NGO would be able to create multiple projects and events which they are organising
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I have one group that has different categories for schools and a theme component that changes the site logo depending on what group the user is in. It also changes the home page to the associated category using Custom Homepage.
Is there a reason that each NGO shouldn’t just have its own Discourse?
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Okay that would make sense, what about projects and events? So for managing projects and events would they create different categories?
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Events would just be a topic, I’d think. Unless it was some large event like a conference that needed a topic for every presentation or something?
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Yes events would be topics and each project would be a category right?
A category or a tag. 
If events are organized on your forum, you can also be interested in these official plugins:
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What if I want to upload photos and files in a particular project which should be visible as soon as I open the category, that is also possible right?
You can upload files of any type (you can choose which extensions are authorized) in a topic, and media embedding is supported for some internal or external content.
If you want to know better what Discourse is capable of, in addition to asking questions here, I suggest you experiment at https://try.discourse.org/ as a user, and/or start a free trial so you can see what the admin options look like.
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Okay thank you very much!!
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Just to add to what others have mentioned.
You can use groups for individual categories(Schools) I would use say a 2 group model as example.
ie
School A category
- Group A Members with request to join option this way a problem member can be booted from group if needed.
- Group A Staff. This group would be Category Moderators one or more would be owner of Group A members.
To arrange topics/projects you have a couple of options. Subcategories and Tags. You may want to create a Sub category only visible to group staff to have a direct place for staff discussions.
Category settings might include for main Category see everyone. create/reply Members & Staff group.
Add plugins as others have suggested and your maybe close to what your looking for.
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- I don’t think categories are a good choice for this, because they are relatively heavyweight. By definition, both projects and events are limited in time. A category is basically forever.
- Actually… although I love Discourse, it’s neither a project management tool nor an event planning one. It might not be the right software for what you envision.
But, uh, really — what are you wanting to do?
You can use multisite too, from the same Discourse base.
It’s not the default installation and could be a little tricky but works and it’s secure if you know what you do or hire someone who knows.
I’m hoping to enable max_category_nesting=3 so that I can effectively have my first-level of categories act as sub-forums, having their own categories and sub-categories.
In doing this, I would LOVE to dynamically change the site logo based on which first-level category someone is visiting.
- Is your site-logo changing theme component available publicly?
- Do you think it could be easily adapted to change based on which category someone is visiting, not to which group someone belongs?
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It isn’t mine and I’m not quite sure how they did it. I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be broken pretty soon, though. They also changed it so that clicking the home icon would go to that category.
You want to change the site logo depending on what category they are visiting?
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Ahh ok.
Yes, my idea is to maybe have a slim global menu above using the Brand Header component, and then have the site logo change based on which category someone is in, so that the first-level categories give a feel of being in a branded subforum.
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I think https://forums.cfl.ca has something like this
I think this is the repository with the component: GitHub - cfl-dev/cfl-category-headers: Custom category headers for CFL Discourse forum
It cannot simply be used for another forum because the images and categories are not configurable. However, it may still be helpful as a model for your own implementation
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I see. I think it might be simple enough to use the category logo and have a theme component override the logo component. I think you could find someone to do it in Marketplace for $300-500.
EDIT: I’m not sure that it’s as easy to override the home-logo component as I thought it is. Or maybe it is easy and I just don’t know how.
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Oh, this makes me so very happy—to see this exists and that you provided the source code for it!
And especially that it’s just a simple CSS fix that I could do myself. Goodness, so much easier than I had imagined.
Thank you both for your help 
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