Try out the new sidebar and notification menus!

[MarcP]

I think we should force lowercase on all menu items in the sidebar. Most sites, including meta use lowercase tags/category names too, so this would be more ecstatically pleasing IMO.

[darkpixlz]

I saw the mentions tab was recently removed, it was definitely better with the tab.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

@MarcP

I think we should force lowercase on all menu items

I think that is a good example something that should do using CSS. I want to remain

• using all uppercase,
• using lists in titles (no and/or)
• using all lowercase

are all very north-american styles and not considered automatically aesthetic or even grammatically right solutions.

We have CSS to adjust… you know… how things looks.

(Forcing to use CSS to fix limitations of UX/UI/functionality is always sign of lazyness of dev side)

[MarcP]

I already made this change with CSS indeed. But I felt like I should drop my opinion here to discuss. To me, it looks way better lowercase and should be default in core.

[Jonathan5]

@Jagster

not considered automatically aesthetic or even grammatically right solutions

To my eyes, some lowercase looks “trying to be cool”, but too much just looks semi-literate. I don’t think it should be encouraged

I take some of that back. There’s something about tags that suit being all lower case.

[MarcP]

@Jonathan5

To my eyes, some lowercase looks “trying to be cool”, but too much just looks semi-literate. I don’t think it should be encouraged

I get your point. But I do think in the sidebar, it should all be the same style and not a few lowercase and a few uppercase items

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

@Jonathan5

There’s something about tags that suit being all lower case.

That’s true. But tags are more like ordinary nouns than names. Or something

[JammyDodger]

I don’t think you have to have all lower case tag names. You can disable force lowercase tags in the admin settings and pick your poision per site.

Quick update - I see now. It’s the ‘Everything’ and ‘My Posts’ ones you’re referring to.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

As far as I know, (please correct me if I’m wrong), an uppercase letter at the beginning of pretty much every word in a title (example: “My Posts”) is very north-American.

Very common on /r/politics, for example (subreddit about US politics)

I was intrigued by this kind of recurrent formatting on Reddit posts’ titles, and a translator friend told me that. In France, and maybe in the whole of Europe, we just put an uppercase at the beginning of the sentence and that’s all.

I don’t know if elements should have a single uppercase letter at the beginning of a title/sentence in the sidebar, or all lowercase, or anything else, but I do know that we can use both CSS and strings edit in the admin, so that would do for me.

While probably a very quick tweak to do from a developer’s perspective, I feel that it’s also very, very low priority (for me at least!) and kind of a bikeshedding.

[carbonrich (Richard Hawkins)]

A few suggested minor UI tweaks, all trying to help with visual hierarchy / clarity / scanning…

1. Bold the section headings (I’ve seen this in some screenshots of the new sidebar, but not on Meta, ignore me if this is the default/planned).

2. The More and All Categories/Tags/etc links are different to the other links in those sections. I think removing the icon on the left-hand side and having one on the right helps clarify this and reduce the visual complexity. (They could also potentially be in italic as well).

3. The More and All Categories/Tags/etc themselves do different things, so should probably have slightly different icons.

I am liking the sidebar, thank you Discourse Team!

Though I would add my support to others requests for at least a right-side option, and I am not a fan of the Community section mega mash-up (though I haven’t read the previous discussion about that): so the ability to edit the title/subsection back to Topics, and then make a Community section that combines Users/Groups/Admin etc.) would be AMAZING.

[Simon_Manning]

@Canapin

is very north-American

A bit off-topic but this is also true of British English - each word in a title should* be capitalised with some exceptions such as prepositions and determiners that aren’t the first word, e.g. “The Book in the Library”.

* That’s what I learned 20-30 years ago, anyway.

[carbonrich (Richard Hawkins)]

I learnt the same here, and I much prefer it, but my understanding (after complaints from several different editors) is that the norm has shifted to Sentence case, see for example:

Typography

I’m not sure that has any bearing on what the sidebar default should be though!

[Jonathan5]

@Simon_Manning

A bit off-topic but this is also true of British English - each word in a title should* be capitalised with some exceptions such as prepositions and determiners that aren’t the first word, e.g. “The Book in the Library”.

This is true for book titles but pretty much nothing else!

[Julienlavigne (Julien Lavigne du Cadet)]

Is there any update on making this available on discourse for teams?

As far as I can see, enabling this doesn’t disable the previous sidebar plugin, which leads to having two sidebars. It would be great to be able to try it and see if anything is missing / whether we can transition to it.

Best!

[Simon_Manning]

@Jonathan5

This is true for book titles but pretty much nothing else!

Also films, TV shows, plays, etc., I guess the distinction is perhaps that those are names while the titles for other things are not.

@Julienlavigne

As far as I can see, enabling this doesn’t disable the previous sidebar plugin

I can’t find the plugin to check but does it have its own enabled setting? If it does, you can probably find it by searching the settings for “enable” and selecting the plugins section.

[tobiaseigen]

Hi Julien! Yes, the new sidebar is coming to Discourse for Teams. We’ll be switching all sites to it entirely once it is out of beta and we offer it on all of our plans. We’ve just been talking internally about letting early adopters try it out now via an admin setting. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.

[P2W (Mike Riddick)]

honestly love it. good stuff.

now to see if I can get my host to update to the beta version so I can test this

Any insight on changing the background color of the new sidebar? I tried to find the CSS code but could not. @mcwumbly

[per_coh (Per Bonomi)]

Just added a link to our discord, but is there a prettier way, better js to use?

<script>
var waitForEl = function (selector, callback, maxTimes = false) {
  if ($(selector).length) {
    callback();
  } else {
    if (maxTimes === false || maxTimes > 0) {
      (maxTimes != false) && maxTimes-- ;
      setTimeout(function () {
        waitForEl(selector, callback, maxTimes);
      }, 100);
    }
  }
};

const selector = '.sidebar-section-content';

waitForEl(selector, function() {
var obj = $('.sidebar-section-link-everything').parent();
var objNew = '<div class="sidebar-section-link-wrapper"><a title="Discord" href="https://coherence.io/discord" id="nav_discord" class="sidebar-section-link sidebar-section-link-discord sidebar-row ember-view"><span class="sidebar-section-link-prefix icon"><svg class="fa d-icon d-icon-discord svg-icon prefix-icon svg-string" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><use href="#fab-discord"></use></svg></span><span class="sidebar-section-link-content-text">Discord</span></a></div>';
obj.before(objNew);
});
</script>

[P2W (Mike Riddick)]

Alright I really enjoying this. I’d like to reorder some components of the sidebar. For example, categories I’d like to move to the top and move move any account preference based stuff lower. Any anticipation that this stuff will be editable in the future?

[mcdanlj]

@P2W check this thread — following site order for categories likely to become an option at some point (don’t know how soon of course).

Ability to reorder categories in the sidebar

Lots of thoughtful responses I love in this post from @LeoDavidson , but especially this: I would really appreciate this. Some indication of nesting for subcategories would be great too, if they were listed under their parent and indented slightly it would help navigation tremendously! Even better if they could roll up under user control. I recognize the “already tried that” from comment 11, but… tried that on a site with on the order of 100 categories and lots of subcategories? It’ll be a me…