Unboxing Discourse 3.5

Announcements Blog
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After six months of steady improvements in our beta releases, we’re excited to announce our latest release, Discourse 3.5. This release, we focused on improving both the member and community management experience. We’ve rolled out Horizon, our sleek modern theme; a new composer option that makes creating and responding to topics simpler; streamlined color management with updated dark mode settings; automatic site translations; and much more.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2025/08/unboxing-discourse-3-5
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IMO this should be emphasized a bit more… it would surprise some admins to find that a bunch of plugins just appeared (not to mention console errors).

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Thanks for highlighting that here! It’s true that self-hosters who are only updating now will have to take action if they are using any of the affected plugins already. But for customers hosted by us no action is needed and there is no change.

The list of affected plugins and what to do is all explained in the topic the announcement links to so do recommend self-hosters review it. If you have any questions or concerns about it, please reply there: Bundling more popular plugins with Discourse core

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So now is the time to switch to the stable branch if we want to hold off removing support for old browsers?

Should we update to 3.5 while on tests-passed and then switch to stable, or switch to stable before updating?

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Thanks for your work :folded_hands: The horizon theme is great! (Even if I would prefer to see tags directly in the topic card but I understand the trade-offs you made). I saw in the blogpost a screenshot about the tactile community, I searched online but I didn’t find it, is it a private community / a test community? I wanted to get some inspiration for my community :slight_smile:

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You should switch to stable before updating.

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How can we do this? (switch to stable) is it a simple task? I need to spend less time on updates and aftereffects of.

Is there a quick write-up or guide to this that you can link me to, please?

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Richard answered this in another post. You want to wait for a stable release, then:

That said, tests-passed is strongly recommended. We use it on our own hosting.

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