Current Projects - August 2025
Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse. We’ve missed a few months; we hope you’ll forgive us once you see all the amazing projects we’ve been hard at work on.
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Kicking off
Updating our lightbox to improve image viewing
We’re in the planning stages of updating our lightbox functionality to improve the experience of viewing images and related files on Discourse. Goals for this project include a smooth experience across Discourse on different device and browser types and support for common image features like captioning, downloading, zooming, and carousel / gallery displays.
In full swing
One step closer to streamlined authentication
We are in the testing stages for our centralized authentication service that will allow admins to effortlessly support multiple login methods, and for members to easily authenticate themselves on multiple Discourse sites with just one account. You’ll be able to try it on Meta soon, so stay tuned.
Improving our welcome banner feature
The welcome banner is a great way to greet visitors and returning members and introduce them to your site, and puts search front-and-center so they can quickly find content that matters to them. We’ve been adding some upgrades to support subheadings, new placement options, and background images, and expect the core feature to serve as a seamless replacement for the similar theme component soon.
Dynamic color palette management
Colors are an important part of displaying a recognisable brand to community members, which is why we’re hard at work making it easier to implement brand colors and manage different color palettes. We’ve also added more robust dark mode support, allowing themes to define separate light and dark mode palettes. Many of these updates are already available in your Discourse site today, with more improvements on the way to streamline the process of implementing and managing your site’s colors.
Review queue refresh
The review queue in Discourse is currently receiving an extensive makeover. While this work is still heavily in-development, some of the standout features are consistent moderation actions, separate actions for users and content, moderator notes, reviewable timelines, a smoother moderator experience, and much more. The initial features will be available for beta testing soon.
Dependency updates
We’re always working to improve the open-source technologies which Discourse is built on top of. At the moment, we’re updating to Ember 6.x, which unlocks a number of performance and developer-experience improvements. We’re also switching our Rack HTTP server from Unicorn to Pitchfork, which should result in significant memory savings in future thanks to its ‘reforking’ technology.
AI translations: admin dashboard improvements and SEO Integration
We are investing in our AI translation feature by adding support for serving localized content to search engines, thus helping communities expand their reach to new members. We are also working on improvements to the translation progress dashboard, which will let admins see how much of their community’s content has been translated into each language. Learn more about this feature…
Wrapping up
Horizon, our new default theme for new communities
Horizon is our new theme focused on ease of use and a more modern look and feel. Our goal for this theme was to provide a beautiful, easy to use design for communities that don’t have the resources or expertise to invest in customizing Discourse. We’ve recently made this theme part of our core Discourse offering and it’s now the default theme in new communities.
Our new rich text editor in the composer
Writing on Discourse has gotten a little easier thanks to the new rich text editor, which offers a modern, WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) experience that will feel more familiar to less technical members of your community. This new editor sits alongside our classic Markdown editor, so community members can choose the writing method that suits them best.
Topic filtering UI refresh
We’ve shipped improvements to the topics filter (accessible through the /filter route or in your community’s “More…” sidebar section) to make it easier to use. You can now easily select the parameters you want to filter on (e.g., category, tag, status, etc.), use autocomplete to quickly fill out your query, and include keyword-based searches to find the content you’re looking for.
Events and calendar improvements
Our events and calendar features have gotten a number of improvements to make Discourse a better platform for planning and managing your community’s events! When creating an event, you can now include a location and description, show in-person events in local time, set an end date for recurring events, and create an event-based chat channel to discuss the event with participants. On the calendar itself, a new “My events” filter makes it easy to view your upcoming events so members can keep up with their personal schedules.
Rendering modernization
Our long-term project to modernize the rendering technology of Discourse is now reaching an end, with the final deprecations now in place. The vast majority of sites are already using the new implementation. Any sites that aren’t ready yet are being shown a warning banner with a link to the post stream update docs, or the more general widget docs.
Increasing minimum browser requirements
Discourse is now taking advantage of more modern browser technologies. For older devices, a simple text-only interface will be shown. Learn more…
Support for Model Context Protocol (MCP)
We started work on Model Context Protocol, which allows users to connect coding IDEs and tools like Claude Desktop to any Discourse community. Expect better grounded results based on the most up to date information.
Simplifying the AI configuration interface
We are finishing up improvements to AI configuration to make it easier for admins to enable and use Discourse AI related features.
