Current Projects - June 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
Bringing GIFs component into Discourse core
We’ve incorporated the discourse-gifs component into Discourse core to make it easier for communities to access and much simpler to set up. We’re especially excited to share that hosted customers won’t need to bring their own API key — your members will be sharing their favorite GIFs in moments. Learn more.
Unified new topic list
The unified new view is now the default for all topic lists on Discourse. This updated structure is simpler to understand than the previous New / Unread system, so it’s a good fit for communities where members want a straightforward experience. Learn more.
Nested replies
Discourse now has an experimental nested replies feature that lets sites display threaded, tree-style conversations instead of flat timelines on a topic and category level. Site settings allow you to configure the maximum level of nesting and how top level replies sort by default. Learn more.
New layout and blocks system for theme customizations
An initial version of a new system for theme developers to define the layout for inserting custom blocks of content into any page. We are now using this for our own theme here on meta: Learn more.
We’re continuing work on refining this version based on feedback from usage of it on customization projects and deciding what larger steps to prioritize next.
Improved DNS changes on our official hosting
Our official hosting experience just got better! You’ll see smoother end-to-end transitions between domain names (for both, *discourse.group or your own subdomains) as we added an intermediate page that walks admins through the process of changing your site domain.
In full swing
Reporting and analytics improvements
We’re continuing our work to improve site traffic reporting, the Data Explorer plugin, and designing an updated admin dashboard to make it easier to access and interpret data about your community’s health and value. At the moment, we’re focused on improving traffic reporting and updating the admin dashboard. Learn more.
Improvements to the Events plugin
We’re working on a number of improvements to the Events plugin, such as making it easier to create events in the composer and directly on the calendar. Recently, we completed integrating livestream into the Events plugin and a number of other quality of life improvements. More coming soon!
Improvements to Free plan
On the Free plan, we’re improving how we handle plan limits based on category count and type for clarity and an improved experience. To help keep your sites safer for members, we’re bringing enhancements to the review queue featuring the Discourse Safety Bot on your sites.
Workflows
We’re building a new system for automating more powerful and complex workflows than we can support with our current Automation plugin. We will be starting to test the feature with some customers whose feedback led to this project first, and then open discussion for wider feedback from the community. Stay tuned!
Kicking off
Server API Improvements
We’re started initial exploration and prototyping around improvements to the usability & consistency of our server APIs. We are aiming for defining guidelines that allow us to create and maintain a more streamlined API with clear versioning, documentation, and backwards-compatibility commitments. Watch this space for more soon!