How would I best split the category select-kit into two dropdowns?

UX
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I’m re-designing the community forum of a volunteer project. We currently have public discussion categories and a few workgroups that are also set up as categories, but access is limited to certain groups. So right now these group-restricted categories are entirely hidden if you’re not a member of their group. But we want to give them more visibility to attract more participants.

To support that, I sketched a design that presents the public categories as “Spaces” and the restricted ones as “Groups”. I want to set up this distinction, because these two types work in two distinct ways, not only with regards to access but also how they are led and moderated.

Global Community Forum
Global Community Forum1365×2989 226 KB

At the bottom of the sketch is the category list and there I can easily set up this separation with the Category Groups component.

But I’d also like to offer two distinct access routes right on the Navigation bar:

Screenshot from 2022-01-26 21-10-27
Screenshot from 2022-01-26 21-10-27715×66 4.74 KB

So both “Spaces” and “Groups” would open a category drop-down list, only with different items. And I’m still wondering if there’s a way to achieve this without messing around tooo much. @Johani I think you shared an elegant approach how to add a custom select-kit recently? Not sure if that would work here, but I already can’t find it anymore.

Thanks for suggestions everyone :slight_smile:

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I recently posted about turning the new topic button into a custom select-kit dropdown, maybe that will help? Convert the New Topic button to a have a sub menu - #7 by awesomerobot

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Ah yes, that’s the topic I remembered but attributed to Joe. Thanks for sharing again @awesomerobot!

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You can modify the category dropdown and have it only show unrestricted categories. You can also create another component that “extends” it and have that only show restricted categories.

All of that would only need a few lines of code, and it’s future-proof.

I do have a tiny question before we get into that. How would this work in the composer? Do you want that separation to also exist when users create a topic, or are you OK with having both “spaces” and “groups” being in the same dropdown in the composer?

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Yes, that sounds like a perfect straightforward solution for the dropdowns!

I think the composer will be better without tweaks. For users that can’t post in a restricted category, it shouldn’t show in the composer anyways.