Custom sidebar sections being tested on meta

OK, I think I am starting to get a better sense of what you’re trying to do. I don’t immediately have great thoughts about how that might be done in practice, though. If you do end up with something closer to what you want using custom sections or additional customization on top of the sidebar, I’d love to see what you come up with.

I think this other topic about using tag groups may also be of interest to you: In the sidebar, can I list the tags by group?

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Yep, that’s the plan. In the first iteration we plan to have the same customizations apply for both anonymous visitors and logged in users with the following minor exceptions:

  • links whose destinations are only visible to logged in users will be omitted for anonymous visitors
  • anonymous visitors will see a short site description, while logged in users will not
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I just updated my Discourse today, and my global custom section is visible to anonymous users as well. I could swear that it wasn’t before, is that a new change?

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Another minor detail: The mouse pointer over the custom section items’ text is a normal arrow pointer instead of a “grabber” hand like over the rest of the sidebar items. Then the pointer becomes a 4-way move icon over the custom menu icons. That is also the case for anonymous users that don’t have permission to customize it.

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hm. yeah, it would be nice to have an option on the custom section editor to hide the section from anon viewers. maybe same for individual links.

i’ll probably add a section hider feature to my script since that’s something i need.

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possible now with my script

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On desktop it now has a pretty bad experience - click on an element and it will prioritize dragging instead of clicking. This makes me always click many times and cannot enter the correct page

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Thanks for this great feature. We’re trying to link to the same category 3 times, but with different filtering/sorting and it’s not working properly.

All links seem to go to the same place and then after clicking on of them, the others cannot be clicked (as if it already thinks you’re in this category).

Links are:

  • /c/ideas-feature-requests/11/l/latest?order=votes
  • /c/ideas-feature-requests/11/l/latest
  • /c/ideas-feature-requests/11/l/latest?state=my_votes
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This is an interesting one.

Making this behave as you’d expect is certainly something we want to do, especially as we are also working on more advanced topic filtering (there is work in progress on a yet to be announced experimental feature that adds a /filter route for this).

At the same time, the logic we have for category lists that dynamically change the destination depending on whether you have any new or unread topics may complicate this. We probably need to make that logic more targeted specifically.

@tgxworld and @kris.kotlarek do you think there’s a straightforward fix to make here? Or is it something that you think might take a bit more of a deeper dive to chart out our desired path forward first?

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We tuned the timings, how is it feeling now?

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Thank you very much for your efforts! Now its adjustment is very smooth

Actually, I’m sorry to say that I recently discovered another bug.

if the link is set to /, clicking it will lead to a completely blank page

image

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Right now the community section is grouped in a div together with new custom sections:

So the sections are structured like:

  • sidebar-sections
    • sidebar-custom-sections
      • sidebar-section.community
      • sidebar-section.any-custom-section
    • sidebar-section.categories
    • sidebar-section.tags
    • sidebar-section.whatever-else

I think a flat structure like:

  • sidebar-sections
    • sidebar-section.community
    • sidebar-section.any-custom-section
    • sidebar-section.categories
    • sidebar-section.tags
    • sidebar-section.whatever-else

would allow for better customization. So we can easily re-order sections along the sidebar.

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Hi, it is a great feature to add a custom section for admin users.

Is it possible to disable this feature for non-team members?
Normal users don’t have to add an own section to their sidebars, also not-logged-in users. They get an error message if they try to submit a new section.

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there is likely an obvious answer to this question but is there a reason one cannot link to public published forum documents out of the custom links section? for me it does not seem to allow a link to /pub even if a doc is public. i also have the setting show_published_pages_login_required enabled to allow anon users viewing of published pages (despite the name of the setting itself).

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Alright, I found out a useful feature with custom sidebar sections:

If you are in multiple forums and are using the Discourse Hub app, then you can easily switch forums using a single link in the sidebar.

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That is worthy of a feature request I think!

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i can tell you that it’s being worked on :wink:

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the Discourse team is amazing - the custom links will work for published public pages once the relevant pr fix is applied. great work. :clap: :+1:

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Configure a custom sidebar links to open in a new tab

Feature request: Would it be possible to add another textfield to each row for the tooltip?

This would help with accessibility too.

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