Could I use an external link here? And use _blank for open new tab?
You can start with an optional brief description of the category.
## Test external
* Google: https://google.com
## First section
* https://discourse.example.com/t/topic-title/12
* https://discourse.example.com/t/another-topic-title/34
* Short title: https://discourse.example.com/t/topic-with-a-long-title/56
* Another title: https://discourse.example.com/t/another-topic-with-a-long-title/78
## Second section
* Topic title: https://discourse.example.com/t/documentation-topic/98
* https://discourse.example.com/t/new-topic/76
Opening this file will give important version compat notes. Others may have it within the description. Ie Category Moderators enhance plugin has disclaimer of only supporting stable branch.
Pavilion gives recommended discourse update frequency to ensure they have time to update their add-ons.
Does this work for subcategories? I have a site with 6 core categories but want documentation for each category, as well as discussion. Not quite sure how best to achieve this.
Just came across this and have a couple of questions please: How can we install it on our cloud-hosted site? And how much longer will the old Docs be around, do you think?
We don’t have a timeline for completely removing the old plugin just yet, but it is no longer being actively developed. Once we have made some decisions about this, we’ll post an announcement about it to let everyone know!
Since this plugin is still experimental, it isn’t available on our hosting, but we’re currently discussing this internally and seeing if we can make this plugin available. We’ll circle back here once we have come to a conclusion there.
I’m gonna just add this for others who may find it confusing, like I was, what the plugin really does.
With all the settings, and the index topic, etc, it can feel overwhelming, on top of trying to understand what can be done, how it can be used, etc. At least, I was a bit confused until I figured out a way to understand it (if I’m missing something here, feel free to share it).
So basically the way I see it is: create your categories the way you want them and then this plugin just removes the default sidebar (with the sections for categories, tags, etc), and replaces it with a list of sections and links inside those sections to topics, categories, external links, etc. It’s just easier for me to look at it that way. It’s something more focused on customizing the sidebar when a particular category is visited. Something like: when category A is visited, replace the default sidebar with that custom sidebar provided by the index topic. Simple.
There isn’t too many options, or I would say there isn’t any options at all. Mobiles just don’t have enough space.
That is one reason why I’m considering leaving docs totally. Of my users aroung 95% are using mobiles, and they use sidebar very rarely or not at all. So curating doc-menu is quite time consuming and I don’t think that time/benefit ratio is in balance
Alright, I’ve read through this whole discussion and I have a few questions. I get that this page’s structure is created by this page, but then you also need an index page for each sub-category as well? The index for this page, must be enormous… or any of the other ones with a ton of articles.
How hard would it be to implement an xwiki style of layout for pages that are part of a Discourse site’s documentation. The UI is simple enough, you check the box on page creation stating that this page is documentation. Now it simply asks you what the parent is. No parent? It’s a top level subject. You set a parent, the page shows up under that subject/category. This completely eliminates the requirement to manually maintain index pages. They look like a lot of extra work that shouldn’t be necessary. And easy to overlook adding things as they’re created.
If you go to https://checkin.technospider.com and disclose some of the items in the sidebar, you can see how the nesting works in a real world example. That entire sidebar is dynamically generated simply by nesting pages under other pages (parent/child relationship). This site only has about 150 pages on it but it would have taken me twice as long to get it completed if I had to make indexes to create all of that.
And that brings me to a UI/UX issue with how the Docs sidebar is laid out. Once you click away from the main page, you lose the initial list of categories. You should have a way to go back on the page somewhere.
Each of your 8 main areas should have disclosure triangles on them so whether you click the box on the main page, or the name in the sidebar, it just drops down and you don’t lose the ability to directly click on another of the main areas.
You have a breadcrumb on each end article, but even that is missing from the 8 categories. Clicking ‘remove filter’ from the subcategories at the top of the page takes me back, but that’s very unintuitive. And you can do some weird things by playing with the filters, for example, the nice green banner disappears if you click ‘no subcategories’
Yes, that’s for site management topics, the index page is here. (index is a tag that reveals all the index pages)
Agree it must’ve taken a good bit of work to corral all the page links and put them nicely in categories with labels. But the result is so darn nice and usable!
[ציוץ=“NiceOldGuy, פוסט:113, נושא:322376”]
אבל התוצאה כל כך נחמדה ושימושית!
[/ציוץ]
זה בהחלט נראה נחמד, אבל כפי שהצהרתי, ישנן בעיות שימושיות ככל הנוגע לנווטות.
ואם ניתן להסיר את העבודה זה נראה כמו ניצחון לכולם.
אני לא מבקר את העבודה שנעשתה, זה נראה מאוד יפה ומכיוון שאני לא יכול לתכנת כדי להציל את חיי, אני לא יכול אפילו להתחיל להעריך כמה עבודה הושקעה בזה, או כמה עבודה עוד יותר תידרש מבחינתי.
זה טוב למסמכים מינימליים, אבל חסרה הרבה מספור שהשתמשתי בו בוויקי שהקשרתי אליו. אלא אם כן אני פשוט מפספס את זה. אני עדיין די חדש ב-Discourse.
לדוגמה, אני לא יכול למצוא דרך ליצור תיבות מידע/אַזהָרה/שגיאה.
For self-hosters using this plugin, our most recent update would require a manual rebuild of the index. This would involve running this rake task:
bundle exec rake doc_categories:build_sidebar
# if running the task above fails due to NoDatabaseError,
# run with the following for typical self-hosted setups
sudo -E -u discourse bundle exec rake doc_categories:build_sidebar
If you are not able to run this rake task, you may go to each documentation category’s settings, remove the category index, save, add it back, and save. This would rebuild them and refresh the category cache as well.
Why are we doing this?
Previously, when the sidebar had to be populated, we will parse each index topic on the fly, and cache them. This update moves the existing indexes to be backed by the database instead of a topic. Doing so exposes our team to more options when thinking of ways to improve the UX of organising the index.
Updates for self-hosters