Current Projects - January 2026
Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse.
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Recently finished
New Discourse brand experience
We’re excited to share our new brand design on our website and Discover! We’ve updated our visual identity to best fit our key audiences while still remaining vibrant, approachable and engaging to anyone that would like to start an online community. More updates are coming soon to bring more Discourse properties under the new design.
Image carousel
We recently added a new carousel mode for images uploaded into the composer. Like our image grid display, the carousel is a great fit for posts with lots of images, since it organizes them for neat viewing. It’s especially useful on mobile where space is at a premium! Learn more.
New site for Discourse releases
We’ve created a new site at releases.discourse.org where you can see release notes for past releases, changelogs for the upcoming release, and a visualization of the support timeline for each release. This is part of our larger project to update how we version and release Discourse. Learn more.
Detailed topic cards for Horizon
We’ve created an expanded topic card for the Horizon theme that includes important details like tags, assignments (through Assign), and votes (through Topic Voting). While we’ll continue offering a simple topic card by default, we expect this detailed topic card to be useful for communities that need easier access to this information. Learn more.
Setting up new Discourse instances without email setup
Thanks to our recent work on Discourse ID, we can now simplify the new site setup for self-hosters by making it possible to get started without email! Learn more.
Wrapping up
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.
Tags and content localization
After shipping content localization for posts, topics, categories, and search results, we now are working on making tags fully localizable so they appear in the user’s chosen language. As part of this work, we’ll also be delivering general improvements to tag management.
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 are continuing to improve the processes & documentation for the new versioning system with monthly releases that have overlapping support timelines for receiving bug fixes and security patches. We will stamp the first “Extended Support Release” (ESR) in January. Learn more.
Category improvements
We’ve kicked off our work to simplify category setup. At the moment, we are working on general improvements to category creation, but we’ll soon proceed to implementing simpler use-case based categories, such as for questions / answers, feature ideas, and documentation. In parallel, we will polish the end user experience for these categories types and their associated plugins (e.g., Solved, Topic Voting, Docs Categories, etc.).
Kicking off
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. We are prioritizing developer experience and maintainability, with a simple but powerful declarative API that makes it easier to understand your customizations, and better boundaries between the core application and customizations, to help theme developers create more maintainable themes. Stay tuned for more details.