5 posts were split to a new topic: Highlight current doc topic in the sidebar identified by their slugs in the index
Is it normal that once I use Doc Categories, when I’m viewing a topic in that category my sidebar navigation doesn’t have the link to the admin anymore? I find that quite annoying but I don’t know if it’s a general issue or my setup. Seems to me that access to “admin stuff” should be in a stable place for site admins?
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Yes, that’s normal. The usual sidebar is replaced by the Doc Categories sidebar. The admin stuff is in a stable place… once you go back:
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Right – is there a way to customize this Doc Categories sidebar? I do like the doc listing a lot, but the fact that “usual” sidebar stuff like “my posts” etc. suddenly disappears is confusing, particularly as the rest of the design doesn’t really change. I guess if when viewing Doc Categories it looked overall very different, it wouldn’t be so confusing. I know that when I first arrived on Meta the whole Documentation thing confused me and I stayed away from it for a bit because of that 
(I was like “OMG where am I now?”)
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A little CSS can give the docs sidebar a distinct background color – maybe that would help?
.discourse-docs-sidebar-panel {
background-color: darkmagenta;
}
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That’s a good idea, thanks! I’m going to look more closely into the different selectors for part of the Discourse page layout. I imagine there’s a reference somewhere.
I can’t remember if I asked the question or not before, but is there a way to apply a CSS rule according to group or TL the user belongs to?
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I’ve spun off a topic with some hints: Finding CSS selectors for page layout, user groups
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For posterity: I just did a new install following all the directions and still had to add and delete the index file using the steps of “adding index → save index→ delete index → add index back” to get the Docs category to show properly.
Perhaps that, or the Rake task could be added as a call out somewhere in the install instructions for the plugin.
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Hi 
Everything works great with this plugin, thanks for it! 
Just one little thing… it kinds “breaks” the in-topic hyperkink anchor behaviour.
The view jumps correctly from A to B, but instead of the usual smooth page-scroll up and down, the page reloads (at the correct anchored position).
Is there a way to fix this?
Is there a way to display topics in a documentation category as “cards” like the category cards? (cf e.g. in Google Drive when you choose card view instead of list view for your documents)
Is there a branch that I should use for this plugin to be compatible with a self hosted instance running the v2026.1 Extended Support Release? I see d-compat branches for 2026.5, 2026.4, 2026.3, and 2026.2.
Thanks for any help!
The plugin doesn’t support a card view yet.
A custom theme component probably could make it work, but AFAIK there isn’t anything ready out of the box.
We changed to use compatibility branches after your release, but the plugin has a pinned commit hash in the .discourse-compatibility file:
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I just installed this plugin and enabled it, but I don’t see the “documentation mode” section on settings page for a category at all. Should it be just below the email settings or where?
I ran the db:migrate and the rake task as talked about in this thread.
Edit: found it, needed to re-run assets:precompile of course
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Now that I had I this running, I quite like it. Though now I have to choose between subcategories, tags, and sections in the “index topic” but overall it’s an improvement.
Is there a plan to bring simple mode to mobile as well?
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I don’t suppose you’d consider allowing links to external sites to open in a frame on the site so I don’t have to rebuild all the docs I created on my old xwiki site?
When I add one it looks fine in the sidebar, but when clicked it replaces the page and you have to go back to view the index again…
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May I know more specifically what your use-case is? I built something that keeps the index on tags, and it fits something similar to what you are describing.
The current official behavior is to display the index sidebar only on index topics. I think it is enough for most applications, but some of us found it interesting to extend it a little bit.
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What do you mean? It should work just fine on mobile.
I guess an option for external ones could make sense. All the external links in the index or per-link?
I dunno on mobile for me it still shows eg avatars next to each topic in the doc topic. Whereas simple mode in desktop removes that
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Got it. I thought you were referring to not hide the posts by default.
I was just thinking that if the external link existed in the index page, then it referred to a document related to that index, so it should be parsed in the context of the site it belongs to instead of exiting the site and loading a totally new page.
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