Most “traditional” or classic forum Category listing

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AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around creating a “traditional” or classic forum category listing in Discourse. meetdilip inquired about listing categories and subcategories in a conventional manner, similar to phpBB or NodeBB. Johani suggested searching for desktop_category_page_style in site settings to change the style for the categories page and provided screenshots of the current Discourse category listing.

Johani also shared a link to Discourse themes, which allow users to customize the layout, including creating a boxed category listing. codinghorror mentioned that the most traditional layout is Categories with Featured topics.

Further discussion focused on editing the homepage layout, with Johani pointing to the Discourse templates and explaining how to add or overwrite templates using plugins or custom code.

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I really appreciate how Discourse allows category listing on the home page. Just want to know whether there is an option to list categories and subcategories in conventional manner

2

Search for desktop_category_page_style in site settings. This allows you to set the style for the categories page.

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Can you elaborate on what you mean by conventional here?

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By conventional, I meant the UI that forums like phpBB offer. I would even go with NodeBB like boxed category listing, if possible.

I don’t have a Discourse forum right now. It would be great if you can give me a screenshot of category listing currently available with Discourse. Thanks.

4

Categories only looks like this:

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And if you have subcategories they would show there as well:

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Here’s a list of some Discourse sites you can look through for some ideas

Additionally, Discourse themes pretty much allow you to change / tweak everything with to your liking including creating a boxed category listing.

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5

The most traditional is Categories with Featured topics.

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Awesome :heart:

Is it possible to change the homepage layout as a whole ? What should we be editing ?

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It’s an honour to meet you. Never thought you would help people with queries on a forum. Discourse team is humble :slight_smile:

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The “homepage” depends on your site settings. In any case, I think what you’re looking for is the templates Discourse uses. You can find those here

you can either add new things to a template using its plugin outlets:

or completely overwrite it using something like:

<script type="text/x-handlebars" data-template-name="foo">
{{! go wild here}}
</script>

where foo is the name of the template you want to override exluding the file extension or .hbs and its path relative to the templates folder.

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