Simplified category setup

Announcements
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Whether you’re new to Discourse or looking to expand your existing community, we want to make it easy for you to create categories to support meaningful conversation. To that end, we’re introducing a significant improvement to the category creation process, which should make this process easier for most use cases, while still allowing for more advanced configuration where required.

In this topic, we’ll review the major changes and share how you can start using this simplified system today.

:microscope: What’s changed

Let’s walk through some of the changes to category creation.

Simplified category creation
Simplified category creation1005×669 32.8 KB

Old category creation, for reference

Old category creation
Old category creation902×918 40.2 KB

1. Focused fields

With our goal of making typical category creation simpler, we’ve trimmed down this initial page to just the bare essentials.

2. Updated color selection

The new color selector (i.e. dropper button) shows the background color and the text color. [1]

Category color picker
Category color picker381×372 31.5 KB

We’ve also tucked away the suggested colors and previously selected colors (indicated by a checkmark) because we felt these added noisiness to the category creation page.

Category color swatches
Category color swatches391×198 9.36 KB

3. Improved style inputs

The Style inputs were tidied up to take up less space, while making the various options (i.e. Icon, Emoji, or Square) more visible.

4. Simple access controls

Discourse offers a lot of flexibility around category access, but we wanted to give you a simple version to cover most use cases. With this new system, you can easily decide between:

  • Public access, so everyone can see, create topics, and post replies [2]
  • Private access, where you specify the group(s) that should be able to see, create topics, and post replies

If you need more flexible permissions, the quick link points you to the advanced settings area (see next section!) where you can adjust access.

Simplified category access selection
Simplified category access selection367×199 12 KB

5. Advanced settings access

For most categories, you should have everything you need on this main page. However, if you need access to all the various settings we have to offer, select the Advanced settings toggle to expose all the extra options.

Advanced settings toggle
Advanced settings toggle986×301 18.9 KB

Most of this is unchanged, with two exceptions:

  • Category slug has moved from the main page to the Settings tab.
  • Text color has moved from the main page to the Appearance tab.

:gear: Turning on simplified category creation in your community

For now, this is considered an experimental change! We’re welcoming your feedback, which will help us make improvements so that this can soon become the new default experience for category creation.

To turn this on, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Enable simplified category creation item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:

"Enable simplified category creation" upcoming change item
"Enable simplified category creation" upcoming change item1274×460 57.7 KB

Note: This Upcoming Change item doesn’t change who can create categories — if you set it to “Everyone”, only admins (and moderators, if you have enabled moderators manage categories and groups) will see it since they’re the only ones who can create categories.

:mega: What do you think?

We’d love to hear what you think of this new category creation process. Did it make creating a category easier? Are there any other improvements you think we could make here to keep making this process simpler?

  1. We automatically set to either white or black based on what’s most accessible on your selected background. You can set your own text color on the Appearance tab, shown when toggling on Advanced Settings. ↩︎

  2. To be precise, everyone who can see your community and everyone who can post topics / replies in your community can do so in this category. If your community is private, any logged-in user can see and post topics / replies in the category; if your community is public, any site visitor can see the category, but only logged-in users can post topics / replies in it ↩︎

18 Likes
Category color selector doesn't show already used colors correctly
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It looks really nice; it’s a really nice quality of life change.

I have a question about how others are creating categories, though. For me, I practically never create a category that will be public right away. This is because, by default, a new category contains this “About the category” topic that doesn’t have much in it and is mostly a placeholder for further changes.

I only make the category public once that About the category topic is ready to go.

Maybe it’s just my own flow, but I’m curious if anyone can relate to that.

7 Likes
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Thanks for your efforts. It looks really nice and could be beneficial if you just want to create a category for immediate use. However, how often does this actually happen in an admin’s daily workflow?

Focused fields, access controls, and advanced settings access:

In fact, all the important settings are now hidden by default. From my point of view, these settings are the bare essentials.

Color selection, style inputs:

Nice :slight_smile:

3 Likes
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Interesting, makes a lot of sense, too. We can look into making that easier to accomplish from the category itself so you don’t have to go back-and-forth.

This is helpful to know, thanks for sharing. When you are creating a category, what fields do you typically update?

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This is great!

So if someone doesn’t dig into the Settings tab, is the slug just derived from the category name (swapping spaces for hyphens)?

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:right_arrow: The following settings are mandatory:

General
Category name
Category slug

Styles
Style
Color

Security
Group: See, Reply, Create

Settings
Position on the categories page

Images
Category logo image

:right_arrow: I usually review this later to ensure it’s correct:

Localizations
…

1 Like
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Yep, exactly. That’s how it worked previously too, it was just more front-and-center, which we felt was too much prominence for something we didn’t anticipate most communities were editing.

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These are the biggest advancements for me. Is this color picker going to be added to Discourse for plugin/component devs to make use of as well? It would be great to have that wherever color is being asked for, whether custom or by Discourse from the start.

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It’s available for use within formkit forms… here’s where it’s used in category creation:

…but it hasn’t been made available for use outside of forms.

We also have a couple separate admin components, ColorInput and ColorPicker, which we should consider unifying at some point as well.

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Would be a useful add to BBCode/toolbar plugins and the new color features of Tag Icons, etc. Old members of my new site are confused why there’s no color picker they’re used to from previous software.

But I digress…as far as category creation goes I turned this on and gave it a try. About the only thing I find less simple the way that Private permissions wind up being a little oversimplified necessitating a trip into the advanced settings anyway. I really like the streamlined approach otherwise!

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Would be great to see if this component enabled for theme settings objects too :smiley:

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Haven’t tested yet but it really looks like it’s going in the right direction to me!

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I noticed that after enabling this feature, I noticed that the Tags tab settings are not preserved.

Specifically the Restrict these tag groups to the ‘…’ category and the Require new topics to have tags from tag groups settings.

I had tag groups defined in those fields. After enabling this experiment, those fields were displayed empty.

Strangely though, saving the form as it looked empty, didn’t remove the previously set configuration, didn’t reset the configuration. The fields still looked empty.

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1 Like