# Introducing admin sidebar navigation
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281
**Category:** Announcements
**Tags:** feedback, admin-sidebar
**Created:** [December 20, 2023, 5:30am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281 "2023-12-20T05:30:19Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2024, 8:45am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/21 "2024-01-03T08:45:23Z")
And yet there is need to open and close the sidebar. But the biggest (mental) issue is need to scroll and read plus aim smaller text to find wanted place.
And horizontal scrolling is always superior to vertical, but surely this is personal thingy too.
But please all of you - dump those 21+ inch three screen setups and do the work on small screens a while…
(And then we are on same question why admins’ desire to put category navigation on the sidebar is such bad idea and insult against UX 😜 )
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### Author:  [@tobiaseigen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tobiaseigen)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2024, 4:49pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/22 "2024-01-03T16:49:15Z")
This is an interesting suggestion.. can you tell us some more about your flow and how you use discourse as admin? What do you go to admin for on a daily/regular basis that then makes you want to be able to get back to the forum again in one click? If you can describe this in some detail and the clicks you take both in the old and new menus, I’d appreciate that.
In my mind, the admin section is a distinct, separate place where you go to do admin things and then when you are done you go back to the forum. Having a different menu in this way of thinking makes sense. I also think we will want to make the admin section visually distinct from the forum, as you see in other apps.
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### Author:  [@twofoursixeight](https://meta.discourse.org/u/twofoursixeight)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2024, 8:30pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/23 "2024-01-03T20:30:00Z")
I’m not exactly an admin in any forum at the moment, but I made this user interface suggestion since I feel admins of forums would have an easier time navigating with a tabbed interface, as they wouldn’t have to wait for the loading screen to get back to the main forum’s interface.
It can also be made that when in the normal forum mode, the admin tab would still appear.
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### Author:  [@martin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2024, 12:26am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/24 "2024-01-04T00:26:16Z")
> [@Jagster](#):
>
> But the biggest (mental) issue is need to scroll and read plus aim smaller text to find wanted place.
We will be experimenting with how the links are organized as well – what we did initially is just a 1-1 map of the old horizontal nav to sidebar nav. For the issue of finding what you need, we intend at some point to add a search box, which can be seen on the Ghost admin sidebar in this post [Introducing admin sidebar navigation - #7 by manuel](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-experimental-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/7)
> [@awesomerobot](#):
>
> > [@piffy](#):
> >
> > compared other apps and one thing I noticed is that access to the sidebar is typically a very simple gesture. Discord and Twitter let you just do a quick horizontal swipe to open the sidebar. The ebay app has a button on the bottom menu. My banking app opens the sidebar when you press the back button. The common theme is that all these gestures I would normally do without even thinking but opening the Discourse sidebar on mobile feels like a very deliberate action.
>
> This is a little trickier for us than it is a native app, because we’re web based. Safari on iOS reserves swiping for back/forward nav and last I knew there’s not a good way to work around this… though maybe that’s changed?
I definitely think being able to have some sort of swipe gesture to open the sidebar would be helpful if we can swing it. I think part of the reason it feels a bit weird on Discourse is because the sidebar button is up in the top right, but it opens something on the left-hand side.
Sidebar on mobile is quite small (including the text) too; another thing maybe we could consider is making it more “full screen” like the chat channel list on mobile, and making the links bigger and easier to hit.
* * *
I appreciate the feedback we have been getting so far – pretty much all of us have been on holidays for the past week+ so it will take a while to continue to make improvements here. We just need to keep in mind this is the _very first iteration_, things will keep improving.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2024, 1:02am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/25 "2024-01-04T01:02:54Z")
> [@martin](#):
>
> if we can swing it
The trouble (at least if we are not on Discourse Hub) is that it interferes with built in backward navigation in Safari. @featheredtoast did experiment with this quite a bit and has more context.
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### Author:  [@Heliosurge](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Heliosurge)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2024, 3:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/26 "2024-01-04T15:34:43Z")
> [@sam](#):
>
> > [@Jagster](#):
> >
> > Hopefully old style will stay there as an option.
>
> very unlikely in the long term, we will continue iterating on this, try it out again in a few weeks after we iterate some more.
Any chance the original can be maintained as an option through a #Customization > Theme component ?
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### Author:  [@featheredtoast](https://meta.discourse.org/u/featheredtoast)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2024, 9:49pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/27 "2024-01-04T21:49:08Z")
I’d still like to have one at some point.
Historically – swiping left and right on the edges of the screen (up to ~20 px out) is browser native forward/back.. This wasn’t the case when I first attempted menu pull outs. When they did land, I tried to extend the pull out a bit further so there was still a target, but then we heard complaints that users were then unable to touch and drag to select text on posts with that enabled. You could still long-press to get selection pins, but touch+drag selection was no longer possible. I backed out on that and focused on in-menu swipe experience, putting a pin in on gestures on the app at-large “for later”.
Pie-in the sky dream is a setting that allows swipes and touch gestures to be more “mobile-app-like” so you opt into “yes I know this will make navigating on the forum feel less browser-like” so we can have our native cake and eat our app-like gestures too.
My thought is with good implementation, there is no reason why PWAs cannot feel as app-like as possible. The question is where and how should we be catering to the idea of “it’s a webpage” vs “it’s an app” on the larger site.
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2024, 10:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/28 "2024-01-04T22:18:37Z")
> [@featheredtoast](#):
>
> how should we be catering to the idea of “it’s a webpage” vs “it’s an app”
Any ordinary users don’t see or understand the difference. For them those all are apps and they are expecting that those act as an app.
That is kind of the point. And we all know what ctrl-c and ctrl-v does no matter what software, app or website is open.
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### Author:  [@featheredtoast](https://meta.discourse.org/u/featheredtoast)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2024, 10:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/29 "2024-01-04T22:43:43Z")
We’re taking it carefully here because Discourse users have demonstrated that they know the difference and care deeply when expectations are broken - See also the amount of folks that are surprised that ctrl-f is search, but not the search they were expecting.
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### Author:  [@martin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2024, 12:25am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/30 "2024-01-05T00:25:40Z")
> [@Heliosurge](#):
>
> > [@sam](#):
> >
> > > [@Jagster](#):
> > >
> > > Hopefully old style will stay there as an option.
> >
> > very unlikely in the long term, we will continue iterating on this, try it out again in a few weeks after we iterate some more.
>
> Any chance the original can be maintained as an option through a #Customization > Theme component ?
As @sam said this is very unlikely – we just want one way of representing the admin UI to admins, and avoid much (if any) customization via themes and plugins in this area, so this is the most consistent part of the app.
> [@featheredtoast](#):
>
> My thought is with good implementation, there is no reason why PWAs cannot feel as app-like as possible. The question is where and how should we be catering to the idea of “it’s a webpage” vs “it’s an app” on the larger site.
I guess then the question is, can we implement this “slide from left for sidebar” feature on PWA/DiscourseHub only? I think that would be a reasonable compromise because these things are more “app” like than just using Safari to browse the forums.
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2024, 6:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/31 "2024-01-09T18:44:54Z")
There is one small glitch on mobiles (meaning at least iPhone). Back to forum text is after email section so admin part comes after everything else.
I don’t know when this started because I used earlier much more user friendly 🤣 old nav on admin side but this mornings rebuilding put me back to sidebar.
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### Author:  [@martin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2024, 9:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/32 "2024-01-09T21:26:47Z")
> [@Jagster](#):
>
> old nav on admin side but this mornings rebuilding put me back to sidebar
I’m sorry, I changed the site setting from a true/false setting to a group based one here [https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/8c6144d116f77e4f46f04993c0c08c5320f7ef1d](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/8c6144d116f77e4f46f04993c0c08c5320f7ef1d) but it had a bug, I just made another fix here [FIX: Incorrect admin sidebar setting migration by martin-brennan · Pull Request #25192 · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/25192) .
To turn it back off, you just need to remove all groups from the setting here:
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2024, 9:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/33 "2024-01-09T21:43:10Z")
> [@martin](#):
>
> I’m sorry
Not a biggie. I was more laughing Sam’s advice to adapt because that top navigation will disappeat at some point, and it looked like it happened quite fast.
Am I too early asking why it is group based? I don’t understand the point in it.
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### Author:  [@tobiaseigen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tobiaseigen)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2024, 10:48pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/34 "2024-01-09T22:48:03Z")
The idea is to let some mods/admins in a community start using the experimental navigation while others can stay on the old horizontal navigation. For larger sites with more mods/admins this is helpful, including for us here on meta!
Thanks for your patience with this experiment - we are just at the beginning of our journey and glad to have you along!
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### Author:  [@piffy](https://meta.discourse.org/u/piffy)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2024, 10:52pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/35 "2024-01-09T22:52:08Z")
Maybe I missed it but I couldn’t find the “upgrade” section from the sidebar menu.
I also find the new sidebar to be a bit of an information overload. But then again, an admin is almost certainly going to be a superuser so maybe it’s something that will be useful the more I get accustomed to it
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### Author:  [@tobiaseigen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tobiaseigen)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2024, 10:56pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/36 "2024-01-09T22:56:38Z")
> [@piffy](#):
>
> Maybe I missed it but I couldn’t find the “upgrade” section from the sidebar menu.
Yeah, I miss this too! You have to know to go to `/admin/upgrade` to upgrade, or use the link on the admin landing page if you need to upgrade.
The next step here is to make the two menus really identical - so they function exactly the same way. Right now they are not. Martin has this on his list. Then we’ll look at optimizing further.
> [@piffy](#):
>
> I also find the new sidebar to be a bit of an information overload.
I think this is legit feedback. Martin mentioned earlier adding a search at the top of the menu to make it easier to find something by name.
I also think we might like to change the behavior so the sections are closed by default, and a close/open all toggle is available somewhere in the sidebar. I currently use it this way and I find it not so overwhelming.
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### Author:  [@martin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin)
#### Post date: [January 10, 2024, 3:45am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/37 "2024-01-10T03:45:14Z")
> [@tobiaseigen](#):
>
> Yeah, I miss this too! You have to know to go to `/admin/upgrade` to upgrade, or use the link on the admin landing page if you need to upgrade.
>
> The next step here is to make the two menus really identical - so they function exactly the same way. Right now they are not. Martin has this on his list. Then we’ll look at optimizing further.
I’ve been working on a PR for this today, I’ve just got to fix some review comments then I can merge. Here is a preview (side note, we are also changing the Upgrade wording to Update some point soon):
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### Author:  [@martin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin)
#### Post date: [January 12, 2024, 6:57am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/38 "2024-01-12T06:57:42Z")
I merged a couple of fixes over the past two days that fix the main issues of:
1. Not having complete parity between old top level nav and sidebar nav, including missing Upgrade button
2. The admin sidebar on mobile was still showing all the main forum sections
[https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/25236](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/25236)
[https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/25200](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/25200)
[https://github.com/discourse/docker\_manager/pull/201](https://github.com/discourse/docker_manager/pull/201)
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### Author:  [@JonahAragon1](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JonahAragon1)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2024, 5:54pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/39 "2024-01-16T17:54:17Z")
I’m still not seeing the Upgrade button in the sidebar after upgrading to the latest 3.2.0.beta5-dev ([1f81e8d857](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commits/1f81e8d85742c6b06af7a2a94dcc9580a9f17daf)) release.
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### Author:  [@tobiaseigen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tobiaseigen)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2024, 6:32pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-admin-sidebar-navigation/289281/40 "2024-01-16T18:32:08Z")
I noticed that too.
Also. Minor but no glyph next to customize \> text
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