I’m working on a collaboration setup that positions Chat as the primary space for member communication, similar to other collaboration platforms. The goal is for members to land directly in their channels or latest threads, making chat the central hub when they visit the site.
It seems there’s currently no way to have chat open in full-screen mode by default. Could this be added as an option?
It could be exposed as a site setting, a theme modifier, or a value transformer. A way to give theme authors or site admins the flexibility to integrate Chat as the default interaction view.
I know it’s already solved, but instead of accessing localstorage directly like this, if you are able to access the plugin services from a theme, you can do:
כן, השימוש בשירות הוא נחמד יותר, אבל אני לא חושב שיש לנו דרך לבדוק אם הוגדרה העדפה כלשהי דרך השירות כרגע. יש לנו?
ואם הבנתי נכון את הבקשה כאן, אנחנו לא רוצים לעקוף שום החלטה של המשתמש, אנחנו רק רוצים לקדם מסך מלא בטעינה הראשונה, אם אנחנו רק רוצים לכפות את זה כן הפתרון שלך יעבוד.
במצב צ’אט במסך מלא, בדרך כלל צריך לצאת ממסך מלא (או לשנות את ממשק המשתמש של הצ’אט בדרך אחרת) לפני שרואים אפשרות ברורה לחזור לרשימת הצ’אטים או לעבור לשיחה עם חבר אחר.
אולי כדאי לשקול אם יש דרך לשפר את חוויית הניווט הזו בתוך המסך המלא עצמו.
Testing the UX in my current case, it actually feels more intuitive to have Chat full-screen all the time. I want Chat to be the primary mode of communication, and allowing it to be minimized users can end up on a screen they didn’t intentionally choose before, which can be confusing.
I’m thinking of just using CSS to hide the minimize option, unless there’s a more direct way to disable it?
@jahan_gagan I’m not quite sure what you were referring to, is this on sites that use a hamburger menu for navigation? In my setup, all navigation options are available via the sidebar.
One issue I’ve run into though: on tablets the keyboard automatically pops up when navigating to a chat channel and it causes a very jumpy layout. I haven’t looked into addressing that, just noting it as a complication.
Yes hiding the collapse button would work, but I just checked and there is one more way users may switch back to drawer mode. If you press the - key when you are in the forum, we open the chat drawer:
And in this function we call chatStateManager.prefersDrawer(), which sets the local storage preference. We have had some more discussions lately internally about allowing a chat-only mode of Discourse, including an experiment in this direction, as well as ideas around drawer mode.
Not sure when the time will come for us to focus on this more, @mcwumbly may have some input here or @lindsey .