Unboxing Discourse 3.5

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke)]

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.

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2025/08/unboxing-discourse-3-5

[NateDhaliwal]

@Discourse

Find and manage our most popular plugins easier now that they’re bundled with Discourse core.

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).

[tobiaseigen]

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

[Dannii]

אז עכשיו הזמן לעבור לענף היציב אם אנחנו רוצים לעכב את הסרת התמיכה בדפדפנים ישנים?

האם עלינו לעדכן ל-3.5 בזמן שאנו נמצאים ב-tests-passed ואז לעבור ליציב, או לעבור ליציב לפני העדכון?

[Albert_Dessaint]

Thanks for your work 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

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

@Dannii

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

You should switch to stable before updating.

[haydenjames]

@Dannii

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

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

@RGJ

You should switch to stable before updating.

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

[tobiaseigen]

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

@RGJ

find the line #version: tests-passed in your app.yml , change it to version: stable , and rebuild.
(don’t forget to remove the # as well)

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

[chapoi]

@Albert_Dessaint

is it a private community / a test community?

Yes, it’s an internal theme we’re working on atm. But glad you like the look

[haydenjames]

אז אם אני מגדיר version: stable בקובץ app.yml שלי היום ובנה מחדש את האתר שלך. שום דבר לא יקרה, נכון? הוא ישב שם במשך שבועות או חודשים עד ש-3.5.0 stable יהיה זמין, ורק אז יקדם אותי לשדרג, נכון?

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

כן, אנו גם נבצע תיקוני אבטחה לגרסה היציבה (stable) מעכשיו ועד 6 חודשים מהיום, כך שתקבלו עדיין כמה הנחיות לשדרוג, אך בזמנים אלו, כאשר תשדרגו, זה רק יקפיץ אתכם קדימה בענף היציב לגרסת התיקון החדשה.