Making the About and FAQ visible to anon

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

We have a login required instance, but would like to reveal our About and FAQ pages to people who are not logged in.

I note that the /tos and /privacy pages are visible to anon:

but we’d really like all four of them like this:

I know how to create links (only visible to anon) to these via a Theme component, but I can’t work out how to make /about and /faq pages (and their navigation) visible to anon.

Any tips?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

You might have better look hosting those on the parent domain such as

www.example.com/faq
www.example.com/tos

And then linking to them from

forum.example.com

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

Thanks for getting back to me Jeff - I know that is an option, but it has several downsides:

1. it will erode the value of our lovely short healthforum.nz domain name - this is of course where our instance resides. We could of course get around this by having the pages in a subdomain such as info.healthforum.nz/faq
2. the existing really nice navigation within faq / about / tos / privacy (and now guidelines oddly if FAQ is redirected) does not work for anon as they remain stuck with just tos/privacy
3. there isn’t a facility to redirect /privacy or /about in order to have the whole bunch + navigation outside of Discourse

Surely there is a way to make those two pages (and the navigation links to them) visible to anon with a bit of theme customisation. @awesomerobot, your topic here looks to contain the building blocks that I would need (I think) - please let me know if I am barking up the wrong tree!

Add custom content that only appears on your homepage

A very common situation you’ll find yourself in as a theme developer is the need to create content that only shows on the homepage of your community. You might add some HTML to the “After Header” section of your theme, which will then appear on every page. You can jump through some hoops in CSS to hide this everywhere except the homepage… but instead let’s use a Discourse theme to create a component with content that is only visible on your homepage. If you’re unfamiliar with Discourse themes …

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

You probably want to look at something like Welcome page for private sites where you’d be adding content to the “account required” page.

As far as I know what you can do with a theme is very limited when login is required because at that point most of Discourse (not just the content) is inaccessible to anonymous users.

[ondrej]

This is possible using the Trendy Login theme component and Page Publishing. If you go to the TC settings you will find a login subheader setting. Here you can add the FaQ and About

<a href="your-url-here">FaQ</a> | <a href="your-url-here">About</a>

Result: