Current Projects - February 2025

Announcements
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Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse.

Your questions and feedback are welcome!

Kicking off

Review queue improvements

We are kicking off a project to make moderation easier by revamping the review queue. This will start with incremental updates to the existing moderation interface as we work toward a new, user-friendly layout for moderators.

AI-powered translations

We recently started working on a project to add integrations between the Discourse Translator plugin and Discourse AI to enable Discourse sites to automatically translate all topics to a user’s preferred language.

Default AI spam detector

The one-click AI spam detector has been working wonders in communities, especially when compared to the Akismet plugin. We are working towards enabling it by default on our hosting so every community can have superior protection from day one.

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.

In full swing

A new theme focused on ease of use

We are wrapping up the designs for our new default theme, which means we’ll soon be kicking off implementation! This theme is designed for communities that want a beautiful, easy-to-use community but don’t have the resources to develop their own custom theme. In the coming weeks, we’ll be making this theme available on Meta for further testing, so please keep an eye out for Announcements related to this rollout.

Composer redesign

After lots of internal testing and refinement, we’re almost ready to share our updated rich text editor here on Meta (so stay tuned to our Announcements!). This will help us continue to identify problems and polish rough edges so that we can make this more widely available in customer communities. Our initial version will support basic formatting and some essentials like image uploads, but we’ll be iterating on this over time to bring more of the current writing experience into this simplified editor.

Site appearance management

We’re currently hard at work building new and improved admin config pages for site appearance management. Our current plans include adding support for dark mode and light mode into individual color palettes, having each theme own its own color palette, and update pages for choosing and configuring themes and components. We’re also working on a new branding page focused on a simpler UI for adding logos, selecting fonts, and color palettes. These updates will be rolled out as they are completed.

Wrapping up

Support for multiple drafts

We’re happy to share that Discourse now supports multiple drafts! Read more about this new feature and how it will improve the writing experience in your community.

Better tools for legal compliance

In light of new legislation for online platforms, such as the Digital Services Act, we now provide more tools for admins to ensure their sites are compliant with these laws. These are optional new settings that are available to all sites, including enabling anonymous flagging of illegal content, and making user data exports quick and easy to manage.

Improved UX for instant plan upgrades on our hosting

For sites on our hosting, we now have an improved user experience for instant plan upgrades from your admin dashboard, so that you can find all the information you need about plan differences and features within Discourse.

Dedicated AI Embeddings configurations

The new Embeddings configuration page is now available through the AI plugin. Configure any 3rd party embeddings or see which ones are provided if you are a hosted customer. With this, there are now fewer site settings and better support for current and future models.

Post menu, topic-list and icon upgrades

We’re now in the final stages of these updates. The vast majority of sites are already running the new versions. Any that aren’t ready will be seeing a warning banner, and should work to resolve the deprecations as soon as possible. The old implementations will be removed in Q2 2025.

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Thank you for the insight, really useful to know what’s happening behind the scenes :smiley:

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Looking forward to this! I think this will be a great addition!

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Any info on this one already? My main gripe currently is that there is no easy way to reorder the toolbar buttons, I hope that’s on the list for the future.
What else is being done? Would love to give some early feedback!

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I don’t think that in particular is on our radar yet.

We’re first focused on implementing a rich text editor mode, so users can create posts without needing familiarity with markdown. We’ll share more very soon, likely within a week or so:

We are also planning on some UI improvements to the toolbar, but I don’t believe the ability to reorder icons is a part of that.

Is there an existing topic where you’ve already shared more about what you’re needs are in this regard?

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As other users here, I’m curious about the new composer (I do like writing posts in markdown a lot, so I hope that will stay as an option for people like me who prefer it to RTEs).

And I’m equally looking forward to the teased new default theme. Not that the current one is necessarily bad, but something fresh that can also be easily customized is definitely welcome.

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Yes, we fully intend to continue to support markdown :slight_smile:

We aren’t quite as far along in this project as we are with the composer work, but we plan to get an early version out there sooner than later so we can incorporate more feedback from others throughout the process.

Our initial focus is more on getting to a set of more opinionated defaults that make sense, rather than customizability. Some of the work we’re doing is driving out additional requirements for additional customization options in the core product though, which all themes will be able to leverage.

In any case, stay tuned!

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Wow, I can’t wait for this!

Thanks for considering community suggestions while maintaining the most supported and solid open-source forum system on the entire internet.

That will help our community, which was facing dark years. Patience and continued building are key for keeping discussions in line.

Full respect and support.

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I just came across the Composer Button Bonanza component which seems to do a lot of what I want.

Mostly, my users would love to find the easiest ways of doing things that are hidden now, like strike-through or footnote. It sounds like with a more WYSIWYG-style composer this might be improved.

Additionally, there is confusion about the “preformatted text” button that appears in the overflow/cog menu when someone is using a touch screen. As an code-oriented community, I would want that button to be always visible.

On the other hand, I realize that some buttons are not applicable to other communities, so a way to customize these to cater for actual needs would be amazing. I mean, I love a good mermaid chart and I can imagine some communities will be using that option a ton!

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Perfectly fine, too. Thanks for clarifying!

1 Like