Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse.
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Recently finished
Introducing the Free plan!
Last week, we announced a new Free plan to make it easier to start communities with Discourse and bring people together! Free sites include unlimited chat/topics, Discourse ID logins, our Horizon theme, and a built-in hosted LLM. Learn more.
Upcoming changes admin area
Our new Upcoming Changes area will give admins the ability to see what updates are coming to Discourse and either opt-in to new experimental features or temporarily opt-out if you need more time to prepare for these updates. This project will help minimize breakages on heavily customized sites and give admins more clarity on what changes are coming to their community. Learn more.
General category improvements
We’ve completed general improvements to the category creation process, with the aim of making it simpler to get a new category going in your new or existing community. We are now turning to improving the creation process for use-case based categories, such as for questions / answers, feature ideas, and documentation. Learn more.
Setting up new Discourse instances without email setup or a domain
Thanks to our recent work on Discourse ID, we can now simplify the new site setup for self-hosters by skipping complicated email setup and offering a free discourse.diy subdomain. You can now have your community up and running in minutes! Learn more.
Data Explorer / Discourse MCP integration
We’ve integrated Data Explorer with the Discourse MCP so you can query your community’s data using natural language in the Claude, Cursor and other AI tools. This makes it easier than ever for admins of any technical ability to learn from what’s happening in their community! Learn more.
Tags and content localization
We’ve made tags fully localizable so they appear in the user’s chosen language which you can see live on Meta now.
Wrapping up
Email improvements
Emails are an important part of how members connect and reconnect with your community. We’re in the middle of work on improvements to modernize and simplify Discourse emails by default, with cleaner subject lines and “From” names, and new support for customizable inbox previews.
In full swing
Implementing a new versioning system
We made our second release and first ESR release using the new versioning system, and are continuing to make improvements to our release processes. Our current priorities are to enable themes, components, and plugins to create tracking branches for each release, and to allow security releases for latest between monthly releases. Learn more.
New layout and blocks system for theme customizations
We are close to landing an initial step towards a new system for theme developers to define the layout for inserting custom blocks of content into any page. Our design team has been testing the work in progress and our developer experience team is working through the feedback and getting the first pull request into a state where we can merge it. Stay tuned for more details.
Improvements to the Solved plugin
We’re working on improvements to the Solved plugin, which lets you set up question and answer style categories for user support. We’ve started by addressing popular feedback requests here on Meta and will soon begin working on other improvements to Solved category setup.
Kicking off
Reporting and analytics improvements
We’re kicking off a project to improve our reporting and analytics tools so that it’s easier for you to evaluate how your community is doing, make decisions based on those findings, and share this data with others. We’ll begin by making general improvements to the look and feel of our existing reports, and then move to improving and expanding our available reports to better meet your needs.
