Going forward, this site will be the primary source of information for Discourse versions, their release dates, support timelines, and changelogs.
On the homepage you’ll find a vizualization of the recent versions & their development/support periods. You can then click through to view changelogs for specific versions. For example, the recent 2025.12.0 release:
For future releases, we’ll be linking to these pages instead of writing dedicated release-notes topics on Meta.
The site also includes support for generating custom changelogs for any version/commit range. We intend to start linking to these changelogs from upgrade UIs in Discourse itself.
Changes to core plugins are included along with other core changes, so it’s just the “non core official plugins” which are missing. Adding changes from other repositories is something we might consider in future, but there aren’t any immediate plans to implement it.
For non-core plugins (both official & third-party), GitHub is probably the best way to track their changes for now.
Good idea! It might be a little tricky to implement, because the commit list is implemented as a “virtual list”, where only the on-screen elements are actually rendered… but I’ll see what I can do.
That’s a bummer. The summary of plugins that aren’t in the discourse/discourse repo was what I found most interesting about the release notes. I can find all the changes in core in one place on GitHub. But the changes on other plugins happen in different repos, so there isn’t one place to easily track them all.
Looks like a good way to visualize active development and support life.
One thing I noticed is that the v2026.01 release is tagged as [latest], but not also [ESR] as v3.5 is. Having both would be a useful at-a-glance reference.
With the extra information between release and active development for versions, is there any setting (or plan to add one) to keep Discourse on a release or ESR version?
Another thing to note about this: we have plans in the RFC to build out some automation for plugins and themes to create branches compatible with different versions of Discourse.
I think the time to circle back to this would be after we get that in place.
This is possible to do now by setting the branch to track in your deployment config:
But once you do, you’re kind of pinned on that release forever. What we still need to build is a better way to see when a new release is available (on whichever release channel you’re following).
We have had some early discussions about how this might work, but are still discussing the details.