I suppose the vast majority of users will use the forum without customizing anything.
For this reason, I suppose I should carefully choose which categories will be displayed by default on the sidebar.
As for your customization suggestions… They’re good. I was never using new topics and unread buttons in the navigation, but now they are available in the sidebar, along the categories I selected, I use them daily.
It (and I) changed my habits, and my experience is improved.
The only thing that bothers me regarding tags is that some are very underused on meta.
A single example: Topics tagged css
7 CSS tags in the entire meta forum? CSS topics have my attention because I’m skilled enough to help people trying to customize their Discourse, but since the tag is never used, watching it seems useless.
And I notice that when I click on a category in the sidebar, it goes to Latest instead of the New page.
If I click on “Everything”, and if there is at least 1 unread message, it goes to Latest as well.
Did it change very recently or did I hallucinate when I wrote this?
Because after a few days of using the sidebar, I was now very used to the links going directly to New messages, and I found it was better than going to Latest.
Ah, yes. Glad you brought that up. I had a small accident with that one a little while ago when I was tidying up the tag list to make them more useable for everyone… But it is being added to new and existing topics as we go along.
There is still a bit of work to do with the tag list on Meta, but I’m hoping it will be more used and useful now we’ve tweaked it a bit (especially with the new sidebar features too ).
That’s funny, because I nearly exclusively use those. I rarely have a need to scroll through a category. Every once in a while I will if I’m looking for a specific topic I know was posted in recently (and don’t feel like using search), but I never just scroll aimlessly. For that reason, the sidebar doesn’t really add much for me, since I just click “New” or “Unread” from the home page.
Can you put the burger menu on the right side? A lot of users are complaining on the left side and I think it messes up the forum logo that is on the left side
I’m using the new sidebar and notifications menus on my website, and nobody complained yet. So far so good !
Although, I liked it better when there was a specific kind of notification for PM, which most of the time require more attention than likes, reactions and such.
Thank-you; this is an interesting sidebar.
Although we’d like the sequence and content of headings to be customisable.
For example we might like the About first etc.
And also the ability to leave out items - that are not in use for example.
Thank-you.
As an alternative, you can change the order of the different sections using the order CSS property.
I also think you can do the same with the order of the links in a section with a bit more CSS.
You can hide unwanted links as well with a display: none; on the right elements.
All of this with some limitations, of course (for example, you can’t move something out of the “more” section…).
1 - Having the option to choose which side the menu appears on (Right or Left) since there are many people who prefer the menu on the right side (Since it disturbs and pollutes the forum logo)
2 - Being able to customize the menu that appears. Example: Let admins choose if they want the tag to be removed or not, if the categories should be removed or not, if only chat and channels should be placed in the menu
3 - Being able to rename the titles of the options, for example: by default it may appear “Personal Chat” but the adm can rename it to “Friends Online”
4 - You can have the option to put some hidden menus in settings in this menu you created, for example, changing the interface is a very hidden menu, it would be very nice to have the option to be able to put the interface menu in this new menu, alias, could have the option of putting any shortcut link of the hidden menus in this new menu
Thank-you Dave.
Probably have all the general stuff at the top: About, Users, FAQ, Privacy, …
Then community stuff: Groups, Docs, Tags, …
Then Categories if they must be there, because we’d probably go for the Full Categories in the middle with Topics on the right anyway.
Then the personal stuff: My Posts, Tracked, Messages, Chats, …
And choice: left or right, Renaming headings …
But then with the capability to reorder and hide/ display headings.
Without looking back through the topic, so off the top of my head, and in no particular order!
Option to have notification pane remain on screen until dismissed (like a right sidebar really).
Option to have side menu off by default.
Ability to change text of all section headings (e.g. Community).
Ability to add sections to the sidebar and to reorder them.
Ability to remove sections, or have them closed/collapsed by default.
Ability to add items (including external links) to Community section.
Ability to remove items from Community menu.
Ability to change what appears under the “More…” menu item and under the “hr” line.
Option to have sidebar default categories the same for new users as for unregistered users (i.e. no “You have nothing here” message).
Categories to be shown in normal forum order, unless user rearranges them.
Option to get rid of the “x unread” links. I’d keep the sidebar just for generic things rather than notifications. Well, maybe I’d stretch to a blue dot, like for chat etc.
– I should add to this that it’s odd to see “x unread” and “y new” but be brought to the Latest (or Top, in the case of Documentation) page when you click on them. At the same time, for me, it would be odd to be brought to any other page than Latest after clicking on the category name.
Ability to add categories and tags from the category pages, tags pages, list of categories page and list of tags pages.
I had a small accident with that one a little while ago when I was tidying up the tag list to make them more useable for everyone… But it is being added to new and existing topics as we go along. 
). 