Redesigning the default category page

That is s regression, we will get it fixed

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I love the new 50/50 view. I think it is a huge improvement. Thank you!
It seems as if the latest column shows the person who started the thread. Is it possible to display the top 5 users like the latest view?

Here is a visualization:

Not planned; we re-used the mobile layout there.

Thanks for the quick reply. I like the current look-- Iā€™m just thinking that it could be helpful to display more than just the first first person who posted. I understand these ā€œminorā€ changes take a huge amount of time so Iā€™ll just leave it at that and say thanks for the big update!

EDIT: Is there a setting that Iā€™m not seeing? On my site the latest user isnā€™t displayed. . . just the first poster. Iā€™d be good with that.

You will need to update via /admin/upgrade to see the latest 1.7 beta changes.

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I defintely would prefer this option

I really like the new categories/latest view but not willing to give up the traditional latest view as the default because of the impact to mobile users.

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The more time passes the more it becomes apparent this view is very much a user preference.

When I go to a Discourse site, any Discourse site, all I want to see is the latest page, if I really need to orientate myself I will either use the hamburger or dip into the categories page for a moment. But as a landing page ā€œcategoriesā€ just does not work for me.

If we can wrangle a way to have some user control here I would be more open to opening the door for more obscure site defaults like (latest on mobile and categories on desktop), but would prefer to wait on that till we have some way of allowing user control.

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For me, when I go to a new forum I like to go to Categories to see ā€œwhat do they haveā€ but after that Iā€™m more interested in Latest to see ā€œwhat is being discussedā€

I like how the ā€œbeen away for a while, redirect to Topā€ works.

Might it be possible to have a ā€œnew, redirect to Categoriesā€ type of thing if that might work?

I usually simply add Latest to my browser bookmarks and open from there, but apparently not all members use their browsers bookmarks.

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Can you clarify what youā€™re replying to here?

Iā€™d love this! :heart_eyes_cat: On all the discourse sites I use it would be a big help to me personally, and it would help out the people in my community (small in number but influential!) who really prefer a category frontpage.

But really my main concern now is that with the new categories/latest landing page the mobile frontpage is boring bordering on useless. If I had to choose between categories and latest, Iā€™d always choose latest - and on mobile there isnā€™t enough space to display both side by side.

Currently the mobile view seems broken - I would have thought it would show categories first and then latest. Right now it just shows a very spartan view of categories and no topics.

This helps - thanks! Now at least the categories displayed are no longer hanging out there without any explanation.

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To this :wink:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/1d7df97c30739385a7a481e6ffe871c5fe529a8f

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I am on 1.7 beta. My category page only shows the person who started the thread. It doesnā€™t show the latest user. Is that a setting or should I re-build?

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If you visit /admin/upgrade you will likely see you can pull in the changes that correct that behavior.

From what I can tell, Iā€™m up to date. The category page only shows the original poster, not the latest.

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Visit /admin/upgrade, there are commits in master that you do not have, that fix the issue.

Or click that blue link to see the commits that have been made since you last upgraded.

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Oh thanks, Iā€™ve never done that before. Iā€™m guessing that if I wait those changes will appear in a future releaseā€“i.e. when Discourse asks me to update. Thanks.

Yes, they will. Probably when they release a new beta version. But if there are updates you want prior to that, you can always manually visit /admin/upgrade

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The default category view of NodeBB seems pretty decent. Is there a way to adopt it here?

Iā€™d like to adopt this view for my forum, but I think the design issues are not yet sorted out sufficiently. As some previous posters have mentioned, the page as-is doesnā€™t clearly distinguish between the two columns. Thereā€™s no clear hierarchy, no visual style to help the eye to organize the different information. I would suggest that the two columns need to be more distinguished. (This is, incidentally, the case in the original example of Battlenet posted by @sam, but I think it has been lost along the way.)

But this shouldnā€™t happen arbitrarily, it should stem from the different nature of the columns. Which, iā€™d say, is this: the categories are (relatively) permanent, while the latest topics are (relatively) transient. But how do we represent this visually? The basic idea would be to make the categories less ā€œdata-ishā€, less ā€œof the momentā€, and more like a stable architecture. The latest topics, by contrast, should be more like something that just happens to be there for the time being.

Obviously there are many ways of achieving this, but here is one approach.

So what Iā€™ve done is this;

  1. Get rid of horizontal lines in the left column, use white space instead.
  2. Get rid of post number data, etc., from the left column: it should represent whatā€™s stable about the site.
  3. Reduce font size of ā€œlatestā€ column to match the secondary text in the left column (less confusing hierarchy)
  4. Reduce avatar size to match.
  5. Add box shadow to latest topics, so that they sit ā€œonā€ the page, in contrast with the categories column, which sits ā€œinā€ the page. (yes, this is basically just a material design approach.) I decided I didnā€™t like this detail, as it doesnā€™t really work with the overall Discourse design. I think itā€™s unnecessary, the design still works without it. But anyway, someone might like it, so i just comment it out below.

Hereā€™s the CSS:

img.avatar {
    width: 30px;
    height: 30px;
}
.topic-list .main-link a.title {
    font-size: 14px;
}
th.topics {
    display: none
}
th.category {
    visibility: hidden;
}
.category-list .topics {
    visibility: hidden;
}
.category-list tbody tr {
    border-bottom: 30px solid #fff;
}
.category-list tbody tr:first-of-type {
    border-top: 3px solid #fff;
}
/* .categories-and-latest .topic-list-latest {
    border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.05);
    box-shadow: 0 1px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.12), 0 1px 8px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.24);
}*/
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I like the new hybrid categories/latest design and switched to it for our homepage. One of my mods pointed out that it does not automatically update, as does the plain Latest page, when new topics/posts are created.

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It sounds like It function as expected in the next release.

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