Previous/Next links for topics in Doc Categories

Many knowledge-base setups let you have a “Previous/Next concept” for pages. I’d love to see that as an option with this plugin. Preferably with the topic names as well.

So at the bottom of the page there would be links like:

Next: Publishing your work
Previous: Getting set up

or

Publishing your work
Getting set up

From the category index we already have a linear organization of topics. That would be where the logic comes from. And the text used in the Previous/Next could be the customized titles that appear in the sidebar since those will usually be shorter.

I can see this integrating well especially into the new Simple mode.

User Story:

We are creating a set of documentation topics for people interested in taking on a translation project using our bespoke translation software (unrelated to Discourse, btw). There is a natural sequence to the steps they will need to take and the information they need to learn.

We could hard code the links at the bottom of each post, but it would be nice if they just appeared automatically based on the order of the posts in the category index.


Since the concept of read/unread doesn’t apply, the regular listing of posts at the bottom doesn’t help.

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Denvergeeks briefly touched on this idea before

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Yes please, it will allow LMS content into Discourse.

This is something asked a lot (the older related IA topic is from 2014). The last one:

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Yes, but with that solution, you have to manually assign what the next topic is. In that case you might as well just put a link to topics in the post itself.

My idea is that the category index would be what determines the order.

(Just to clarify what I’m talking about)

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Which solution? I didn’t intend to tell you that the plugin was a solution, but I wanted to add that the idea to use the sections from the doc index for previous/next topic buttons has come up before.

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Yes, I hoped my parenthetical would clarify my intention. Didn’t work.

I just didn’t want a casual reader to think that the post you linked to offered a solution.

Thanks for linking to it. I agree, it seems like there is a demand for it.

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