The component includes a few blocks you can display in the sidebar:
popular-tags
top-contributors
recent-replies
category-topics
custom-html
subcategory-list
minimal-gamification-leaderboard (only available when using the Discourse Gamification plugin)
You can also use other Ember components as blocks, you just need to use the correct name. For example, core includes a signup-cta Ember component, and you can use it in the sidebar as is. Note that you can’t use components that expect a set of parameters, but you can build your own Ember component in a separate theme and reference it just by its name in the sidebar’s blocks setting.
You can control some features for the provided blocks via parameters.
name
description
default
value
available for
count
limits number of results
varies
number
all except custom-html
excerptLimit
limits length of each reply excerpt
150
number
recent-replies
id
category id
category id
category-topics
content
contents to display
html
custom-html
scopeToCategory
only shows in category X
category id
popular-tags
excludedTags
list of excluded tags
tagnames
popular-tags
displayInSpecificCategories
list of categories to show the widget
all
comma-separated numbers
popular-tags
id
leaderboard id
number
minimal-gamification-leaderboard
Settings
blocks: choose the blocks to display and adjust their ordering
show_in_routes: decide on which topic list routes to display the sidebar. By default, it will show it on all discovery routes except for /categories.
Note that the component comes with only very basic styling, the assumption is that admins using the component will add their own styling in their own theme.
Known limitations
Currently the component does not support targeting single category routes to display the sidebar.
PR welcome
Thank you for the theme component, this is something I was looking for. But it is not working in my end, although I followed the steps above in detail.
One more request, is it possible to insert these blocks inside the topics as well?
Great to see this as an #official Theme Component! It certainly opens up a new world of customisations.
I’ve got 2 questions:
In the sidebar, I want to display the /latest topic list similar to the way that category-topics displays them. Is this possible? recent-replies almost gets there (especially if the excerpt is hidden), but I really want to include topics without replies.
Is it possible to only display the sideblocks in certain categories? What I mean is that the only route displayed is the Category Topic List, and only for the categories I specify.
Apologies, the documentation for this is lacking (I will update it now). The name of the param for custom-html is content.
We don’t have anything ready-made for the full /latest list, but you build your own and add it to the configuration using its name. Should be very similar to the category/tag lists, just without a filter.
Currently, no, you can’t show it on specific categories only. You can however use discovery.category in the show in routes setting, that will only show the sidebar on category routes (but on all of them, not a subset).
Just noted a limitation of the component, especially when it comes the category-topics & subcategory-list blocks, and that is adding multiple blocks of either of these types with different id always resulted in them surfacing topics/subcategories of the uppermost block in the launch editor (I assume).
One bug I’m having right now is after playing around with the subcategory-list block for around 10-12 times, it stop showing altogether on our staging site (see video below).
The subcategory-list block does not take a parameter at all. When used, it will show the subcategories of the current category based on which current category you have navigated to… so it doesn’t make sense to use that block more than once.
That is also why the subcategory-list isn’t showing in your video. If you’re on a non-category route, that block does not show.
For category-topics, in your video I see the same ID used twice: 7. I did a local test and with different IDs I get different topics displayed (i.e. I can’t reproduce the reported bug).
Currently, no, this option does not exist. It makes sense to add it, although, I would imagine that it should support multiple IDs so you can show the block for a list of categories (A, B and C, for example). I am happy to review PRs on the repo, if your developers think they can add this, that would be great. (Otherwise, I can add it to a list of nice-to-haves in the theme component.)
Do you mean a) to fetch the results and cache them for a week or b) to fetch the top contributors for the last week on every load? The latter should be easy to add, caching is a little trickier.
I’m not sure where to find the code for that - would you mind directing me? I’d like to look at modifying the category-topics so that having no ID gives you all categories (and thus effectively the /latest list)
