The discussion revolves around extending the Discourse sidebar to make it more functional and visually distinct. AstonJ seeks ways to widen the existing sidebar and populate it with content like recent topics or events, aiming to reduce its underutilization. Arkshine suggests a right-side sidebar plugin, but AstonJ prefers enhancing the left sidebar to avoid redundancy. Lilly points to plugin outlets in the sidebar that allow theme components to extend its functionality, noting that such extensions are part of Discourse’s open-source framework. Firepup650 clarifies that the suggested solution is a theme component, not a plugin, reducing upgrade concerns. merefield references a feature-rich sidebar framework, while Lilly reinforces that theme components are standard for customization. AstonJ then asks about adding an iframe or image at the bottom, suggesting it might be achievable through theming.
Are there any guides or how-tos here that show you how to extend the built-in sidebar?
For instance, to widen it slightly then show the latest 5 topics out of our news section? Or maybe show upcoming events?
It’s great that we have a sidebar but it is underutilised at the moment - would be great to to extend it and help make each Discourse forum different.
That’s not exactly what you want, but you might be interested in this component. It doesn’t extend the sidebar but adds a new one on the right, and you can see the latest replies.
Thanks @Arkshine I saw that but I generally try to avoid large plugins as they can sometimes be a pain when it comes to upgrading the core product (however it’s good to see that one is an official plug-in and so I’ll definitely check it out in more details).
I’m also not sure we need a sidebar on the right as we already have one on the left. I think slightly widening the existing one and adding more to it makes better sense, as it’s fairly redundant atm unless you have a lot of chat DMs or chatrooms you use.
There are now plugin outlets you can use in the sidebar, so it’s conceivable that a theme component could use them to perhaps achieve what you desire.
Just a note, that’s not a plugin, only a theme component, so it’s probably less-likely to cause issues when updating.
You might need some developer assistance but this is feature rich:
Discourse is built on open source code so that plugin and theme components are how you “extend” the core features to suit your own forum’s needs.
Thanks everyone.
What about adding an iFrame or an image at the bottom? It’s been a while since I looked at Discourse theming, but surely that should be easy enough to do?