Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly-ish newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse.
We’ve been busy! I missed a month, so there’s more time to cover and a lot going on, so let’s dig in.
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Kicking off
Exploring simpler authentication
We are in the early stages of exploring offering a centralized authentication service that would allow admins to effortlessly support multiple login methods and for end users to easily authenticate themselves on multiple Discourse sites.
Exploring a new conversational search experience
We are exploring ways to help people explore the knowledge created by communities by augmenting search with a new conversational experience powered by AI. While we have an initial version of this enabled on meta, it’s still early days. Learn more…
In full swing
Horizon, our new theme focused on ease of use
Horizon, our newest theme, is now available on Meta so members can try it out and share their feedback. Horizon is designed for communities that want a beautiful, easy-to-use community, but don’t have the resources to develop a custom theme. We’re addressing the feedback that’s now flowing in and getting ready to launch an in-depth beta program with interested communities. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please take a look and let us know what you think! Learn more…
Our new composer
You can try our new composer, which offers a rich text editing experience, here on Meta alongside our traditional markdown composer. We’re grateful to everyone who has provided their support and shared suggestions for improvements. This feedback is helping us prepare to make the composer more readily available on our hosting so that more communities can benefit from the easier writing experience. In the meantime, we encourage you to keep testing here and sharing your feedback. Learn more…
Site appearance configuration
We’re continuing to make improvements focused on enabling admins to more easily configure the appearance of their site, including new pages for installing and configuring themes and theme components, selecting fonts, adding logos, and editing what color palettes are available. We thought we were ready to ship an initial version of some of this work, and rolled some of it out earlier, but then rolled it back based on the early feedback we received. So we’re hard at work getting it to a state where we can get it back in front of you and iterate together.
A new multilingual experience
We are working on new translation features that will enable an entirely new experience for multilingual communities. We are working towards an initial version that is ready for wider feedback, but there’s a lot to figure out while we’re exploring what’s possible now with LLMs, what belongs in the Discourse Translator plugin, and what belongs in core. Stay tuned!
Review queue improvements
We have been making small improvements to the review queue while doing some research to inform an updated design. We’re now ready to begin working towards a new design that we think will help moderators more effectively handle items in the review queue. Learn more…
Ability to configure personas for all AI features
We’re working on updating all AI features so that they are backed by configurable personas. This will enable admins to further tune these features to the needs of their community with custom prompts and tools.
Topic Page rendering modernization
As part of our frontend-rendering modernization project, we’ll be starting to tackle the topic page. This will bring an improved developer experience, and new extensibility options for plugin and theme authors. As the project progresses, we’ll be posting on Meta about any required theme/plugin changes.
Deprecating support for iOS 15 and other older browsers
We are deprecating support for iOS 15 and some older browsers because they lack support for modern browser features that we plan to leverage in our ongoing modernization efforts. People using these browsers will see a warning informing them of the deprecation that links to a topic with more details. Learn more…
Wrapping up
Header search, welcome banner, and category icons and emojis
To make it easier to customize your community’s appearance, we’ve added some new features inspired by popular theme components. In addition to improved ease of use, this also reduces compatibility issues with site themes. These features are available through simple site settings, or category-level settings for icons / emoji. Learn more…
Sentiment analysis dashboard
We shipped an initial version of a new sentiment analysis dashboard, and then made some additional tweaks based on initial feedback. We think there’s plenty more to do here in the future, and we’ll continue to make small iterations but pausing our focused efforts in this space for now while we make space to learn more from real world usage. Learn more…
Enabling moderation of group chats
In order to continue to foster safe and healthy communities, we’ve added features to allow admins to moderate group chats. Learn more…
Comprehensive admin search
We’ve introduced a new comprehensive admin search feature to enable admins to search all the things in the admin interface, including pages, site settings, themes and components, and reports. Admin search is available via a sidebar link in the admin interface and with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl/⌘+/. Learn more…
Replacing Akismet with AI spam detection
We’ve rolled out AI spam detection as the default spam detection and prevention feature on most of our hosting. With this new method, we are seeing more effective spam detection, and have greater control to intervene and improve it. We now recommend it for all sites as a more effective way than Akismet to detect spam. Learn more…
Other developer news
We’ve made a few announcements in the past month about upcoming changes that will impact theme developers, including our plans to move to JS native-class syntax for themes and plugins, and our plans to remove support for template overrides and mobile-specific style sheets. See the latest topics tagged with dev-news for more information. Learn more…