Doc categories are designed for a specific kind of content: reference material that readers come back to, scan quickly, and link to often. To support that, we’re introducing a new simple mode for the Discourse Doc Categories plugin, which gives documentation a focused, reading-first experience while keeping the full topic available one click away.
A reading-first topic view
When simple mode is on, opening a doc topic puts the document itself in the spotlight. Replies stay one click away behind a toggle on the OP:
Show 12 comments / Hide comments
Click it, and the full discussion appears in its usual place, ordered and rendered exactly as it always is. Click again to collapse it.
A couple of details worth calling out:
- Linking directly to a reply (
/t/slug/id/4) auto-expands the topic, so anyone arriving from a share link or notification lands on the post they were sent to. - New replies that arrive while the topic is collapsed get counted into the toggle label, so you can see at a glance when something new has come in.
A documentation-shaped topic list
Inside a doc category, the topic list is also simplified: columns focus on the title and when it was last updated, with the Activity column reading as Updated. Readers can scan titles and spot what’s fresh at a glance.
The result feels closer to a knowledge base: a clean list of articles, each one a click away.
Enable it on your site
Simple mode is shipping as an experimental upcoming change. Head to the upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and look for Doc categories simple mode to opt in.
The change only applies to topics inside categories configured as doc categories, so the rest of your site is untouched.
We’d love your feedback
Simple mode is early, and we expect to keep iterating. If you turn it on for your docs, please share what’s working, what feels missing, and any rough edges you run into. Your feedback will shape where this goes next.