This Discourse plugin allows to set any existing Discourse page (a topic, a category, etc.) as the home page of your Discourse instance.
The repo is here:
https://github.com/sylque/discourse-home-page
This plugin is especially useful when used with DiscPage.
Settings
discourse_home_page_enabled : set to true to enable the plugin
discourse_home_page_path : path of the home page. For example /t/12 will set the home page to topic 12 and /c/5 will set the home page to category 5.
**** EDIT, NEW FEATURE:
You can support localized home pages by adding more values to discourse_home_page_path. For example, the following will redirect
French-speaking users (as detected by Discourse) to topic 13,
German-speaking users to topic 14 and all other users to topic 12.
/t/12
fr,/t/13
de,/t/14
Drawback
When the home page points to a topic, the url in the address bar is changed to the topic url.
Example: if your Discourse url is www.mydiscourse.org and you set the home page to /t/mytopic/12 , then any user coming to www.mydiscourse.org will see www.mydiscourse.org/t/mytopic/12 in the address bar.
Warning
This plugin ia based on a hack. There is no certainty it will keep working in future versions of Discourse, even though I’ll do my best to maintain it.
There is this line in Discourse which might cause an issue, but I couldn’t get my Discourse instance to run through it. Please let me know if you can.
That can be achieved by setting your homepage to Latest Topics. You can make that change my running your site’s setup wizard again and selecting Latest Topics in the Hompage step. Specifically, go to /wizard/steps/homepage to see this step. You won’t need a plugin to set this.
If you need to set the category page as your home page, I believe this plugin is not required. Just run the Discourse wizard (https://forum.yourdomain.com/wizard) and change the Homepage combo box.