my solution is converging on creating a site map topic with emphasized tags.
discourse is amazing software. i love how you can invoke a category or tag with # in the post editor (and append ::tag if there is ambiguity between a category and tag with the same name).
here is an example:
# Site Map
## #food
- #asia #europe #america
- #breakfast #lunch #dinner
- #noodle #soup #baking
- #technique #healthy
this allows me to present/emphasize a subet of tags in whatever ordering/organization i want.
the question remaining is how to present this site map.
i could use a custom sidebar section, but honestly if it belongs anywhere in the sidebar, it belongs in the top (Community) section. or atop Categories.
i could inject it in there with js, but hopefully editing the community sidebar section will be a feature someday.
also, i have entertained the idea of trying to make a theme component that shows the contents of a topic on the homepage. maybe it exists already though?
a preview of how that looks (with tags sort of randomly chosen):
support
documentation
my two biggest problems with this so far:
- it seems you can’t hover for tag and category descriptions when they’re invoked with # in a post.
- for tags that are in use in multiple categories, clicking on a tag as shown above is not that useful. i may have to actually link to something like
/tags/c/documentation/10/referenceinstead of/tags/reference, which kind of messes up the simplicity of the thing, but it’s not a deal breaker. it would be cool if you could do something like#reference::category:documentation→/tags/c/documentation/10/reference