# Moving to a Single Category Style Site Setting

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/moving-to-a-single-category-style-site-setting/282441>\
**Category:** Announcements\
**Created:** [October 16, 2023, 8:53pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/moving-to-a-single-category-style-site-setting/282441 "2023-10-16T20:53:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 12

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**Author:** ![awesomerobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/awesomerobot/32/142900_2.png) [@awesomerobot](https://meta.discourse.org/u/awesomerobot)\
**Post date:** [October 19, 2023, 7:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/moving-to-a-single-category-style-site-setting/282441/12 "2023-10-19T19:37:51Z")

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> [@Nacho\_Caballero](#):
>
> I just tried it on my site and saw a significant styling difference for the ‘box’ option.

This theme component won’t work properly until the changes that remove the alternate styles are merged into Discourse. Currently our work is on a branch, [https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/category-bullet-only](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/category-bullet-only)… and the theme component is working with that. It’s still a work in progress.

> [@Firepup650](#):
>
> How would this affect theme components such as this one?

The category icons component will need to be refactored, we can work on that before this update happens.

> [@manuel](#):
>
> Would this be merged into the Category Icons component or would we need two components (or custom styles) for a plain style with icons?

For the default bullet category style with icons, this should be handled by the component… but for the additional box/bar styles it will require both components.

> [@manuel](#):
>
> So wonder if classes and style declarations will be unified as well?

This is also true for mentions like #announcements — we looked at this and the outcome was that it’s too complicated to use a shared component… but I can take another look at how closely we can mirror the HTML & CSS between the variations.

> [@PrettyGirl](#):
>
> Is it too overwhelming to maintain code? or just to promote/sell the same theme components in the future?

There are a few reasons, but the default bullet style is used by the vast majority of sites we host, and as we’ve introduced new features like the sidebar and category mentions (like this: #announcements) multiple styles complicates things.

Supporting multiple variations means we have to accommodate and test for everything 3-4 times. This becomes hard to justify when a feature is purely visual and only used by a small % of sites. Moving something like this to a theme component means we can simplify Discourse a little while still supporting the sites that use the alternative styles.

We generally don’t sell theme components, but we do build custom components for our Enterprise customers. There are no plans for this to change.

> [@TheDarkWizard](#):
>
> Are there any intentions of removing or touching the `desktop category page style` setting?

No plans at the moment, but this is a similar situation where most sites use the default style (by a wide margin). If we were to do this, we’d likely follow a similar plan and support the removed styles via theme component.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/moving-to-a-single-category-style-site-setting/282441)._