Displaying "full topic" text on category page + access to subcategory from menu bar

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

In my community we have a very large FAQ. To make each question more easily accessible (for linking), we have broken it down into separate topics in a FAQ subcategory (it’s part of the “learning” top-level category).

Here’s what it looks like now, with the Air Theme and Categories Navbar component.

I’m trying to figure out how to do two things (neither look straightforward)

1. add direct access to subcategories in the navbar through a dropdown
2. display the topics in “full-text” mode, on desktop as well as mobile, so that people can just scroll down without opening the topics and read through everything if they feel so inclined.

How would you manage this?

Here’s what it looks like now:

And link if you want to see directly: FAQ - Diabète Félin

Thanks for your help!

[NateDhaliwal]

@stephtara

add direct access to subcategories in the navbar through a dropdown

Since that’s a separate component, you’d likely need to ask on the component’s topic.

@stephtara

display the topics in “full-text” mode, on desktop as well as mobile, so that people can just scroll down without opening the topics and read through everything if they feel so inclined.

So you want the full topic post to be in the topic card, not the excerpt?

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

@NateDhaliwal

Since that’s a separate component, you’d likely need to ask on the component’s topic.

The solution might require using another component I’m afraid :-/

@NateDhaliwal

So you want the full topic post to be in the topic card, not the excerpt?

Exactly — just like on a blog you would be able to display full posts on the home page rather than excerpts.

OR some other way to « collate » all the topics (without replies) into one single page.

[NateDhaliwal]

I believe both can be done with Theme Components.

@stephtara

OR some other way to « collate » all the topics (without replies) into one single page.

This might pose some performance issues since all topic posts are displayed (but can be mitigated with lazy loading?). If you have many topic’s like Meta, this might become unfeasible (unless you load more topics as the user reaches the bottom).

[stephtara (Stephanie Booth)]

It’s just for this category and maybe a couple of others with a limited number of topics.

So… I need to learn how to develop theme components?

[Moin]

What is the advantage of having these questions in separate topics instead of separate posts within one topic? One topic is scrollable in Discourse without any customization. And you could for example have a table of content in the first post

[NateDhaliwal]

Or, if you have a budget, you can post in Marketplace.

[ToddZ]

@Moin

What is the advantage of having these questions in separate topics instead of separate posts within one topic?

I’m also curious about that. Is the intention to keep each FAQ topic open for replies and discussion?

(Otherwise I might have suggested a single topic post with Table of Contents enabled. Then the whole thing would be scrollable, but also easy to navigate to section headings.)

[Moin]

@ToddZ

Otherwise I might have suggested a single topic with Table of Contents enabled. Then the whole thing would be scrollable, but also easy to navigate to section headings.

I think disco-toc still works per post. I thought of this, too; it’s actually what I created on another Discourse forum. But I am not sure I would say that it’s easy to link to one of the questions in that case. Headings have anchors, so you can link to them, but once a new question is added within the FAQ, all heading IDs after that heading change, which breaks all the links. Then, finding these links in older support topics is not helpful anymore because they no longer take you to the right paragraph but only to the topic. That’s why I usually don’t link to the FAQ but quote it each time.