The discussion revolves around creating a private/unlisted category in a Discourse forum where individual topics can be made visible to normal users. kkukshtel wants to build a CMS backend where content can be stored in a hidden category, but some topics can be “promoted” to be visible.
Lilly suggests using user groups and category security permissions or a theme component called Category Hider. However, kkukshtel finds that muting a category makes it invisible to users who haven’t created topics in it, but using user groups doesn’t work as the topics themselves become invisible.
Lilly recommends staging topics in the invisible category and then moving them to a visible category when needed. However, kkukshtel explains that the topics should remain in the invisible category, which is meant to be a “CMS” category not directly seen by other users. They also note that normal users can still see muted categories on the all categories page, even if they haven’t made a post there.
I’m trying to build something like a CMS backend on my forum and want a place to put the CMS content where normal users wouldn’t be able to see it. Right now this means default muting a category and then unlisting all the topics (“pages”) inside of that category. I’m wondering — is there a better way to do this?
Ideally there could just be a private category where individual topics could be “promoted” to visible, though the category is still invisible. Is there a way to do this?
You can also use a combination of user groups and category security permissions to achieve what you want.
Or perhaps this TC is what you want?
Looking inside that theme component gave me a bit of the answer I was looking for — mainly that muting a category won’t surface it to people who haven’t created topics in that category. So it doesn’t appear for people.
Trying to work with user groups though notably doesn’t work — the category being set as non-visible for anyone besides admins means that the topics themselves are also invisible. I surface some of the “CMS” stuff as pages on the site so those do need to be visible when accessed.
Oh — the point is that the post never leaves the “invisible” category. The invisible cateory would be something like “CMS” that isn’t meant to be directly seen by other people on the forum.
Also I changed the settings back on the category I was testing with an now normal users can still see the “Muted Categories” section all the all categories page despite not having made a post there.
