discourse-theme-category-homepage
I’ve worked quite a lot on a new category-box homepage for my community’s forum. It’s quite specific for our needs and then may not be useful for a lot of people, but one might take ideas from it.
After/Before
Our specific usecase
We have a community that deal with a lot of broad topics. We federate local NGOs that have their own members, and we do have autonomous groups, each of them are performing one or multiple actions that they need to advertise and they also need a private space to talk about them.
A significant part of our members are old persons and any action that is more than 3 clicks long is very hard for them (so managing notification level the usual way is not doable for them).
The community large enough for us to need a strong sorting system, but the users digital skill and willingness is quite low so we need to keep something as easy and explicit to use as possible.
Topics organization
The top level categories are used as hosts for the community main purposes.
Any topic that does not refer to a group belong to the closest top-level category, and its main points may be labeled with tags. A tag is mostly but not necessarily contained in a top-level category.
Each NGOs and local groups does their announcements in a public subcategory of the most obviously related top-level category and quietly works in a private subcategory.
Thus, a user can easily find all the content about one of our main purpose (top-level category), about one specific topic (a tag that could be transversal to multiple purposes), about one specific group (a public subcategory), etc.
Features
- Highlight each category to make them feel as whole section of the website.
- Write with bold font and add an icon to anything one can click on, so it’s easier to focus on the important stuff.
- Add additional stuff for each category:
- the usual amount of posts
- the notification level selector
- a link “Click here to see all posts relative to that domain” in order to be extra explicit
- Add tags related to that category
- add a header to make very explicit these things are the main themes we are discussing about
- these tags are selected with a theme setting
- the tags display is made so that tags actually look like tags, so user understand what we are talking about when we use the word «tag».
- note : the display is enhanced by the Tag icon component
- Add header to subcategories to make extra explicit that these categories are for announcement, and an other one to make extra explicit that these subcategories are private (yes, there is a lock and any medium level user understands. But…)
- note : the display is enhanced by the Category icon component
- Most of these features are toggle-able.
Install
Note : this component is still Work in Progress. I’m still updating it, correcting CSS bug that I’ve propagated elsewhere, etc. Please show mercy and let me know if something looks odd.
Install the component as usual. How do I install a Theme or Theme Component?
Repository : https://framagit.org/oca/discourse-theme-category-homepage.git
Road map for future enhancements
Fix the very large amount of CSS bugs.
Fix the thing that force displaying for separator/header for subcategories even if there is no public or no private subcategory
Do an as-nice category page displaying subcategory boxes and topics.
Update everything as soon as the Discourse team decide that sub-sub-categories might be a thing (I know, let me hope…)
I’m open to new feature suggestions, but I will add them in this component only if they serve my very specific usecase or are very easy to do. Any new feature added will be toggle-able.
