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)
add direct access to subcategories in the navbar through a dropdown
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.
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).
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
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.)
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.
It allows us to link to one of the questions directly and easily in responding to somebody. One of the issues we have in my community is that we have a large amount of documentation and it covers pretty much everything, but people are overwhelmed when they arrive (“my cat is dying”) and don’t read, and the people who respond are not very tech-savvy, so asking them to (on Facebook) copy and paste the link to a Google Doc in their response is too much – they just don’t do it.
Discourse makes it much easier for non-techy people to link to stuff inside the community: click the little linky button, start typing a keyword or the name of the thing you want to link to, and there you go. We want to make it easy to refer to people to a single item in the FAQ rather than the whole FAQ.
yeah, no budget sadly, I’m already using my own money for the hosting
more seriously: if I want to get started cobbling something together to suit my needs, is there a category in Meta to get assistance with that? I don’t mean have somebody do it for me (I’m realistic), but answer “newbie dev” questions about how do I do xyz in my component, etc.
But the issue here is “creating a link to a section heading: if I click on the link button and start typing, is Discourse going to offer up section headings to link to directly, or only topics/categories?
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