We’ve rolled out an update to the Meta Branded theme homepage to make it easier to find conversations and get a better sense of what’s happening across the community. This builds on the existing latest topics view so you can spot active conversations, upcoming events, and who’s contributing.
If you’ve had a chance to poke around, we’d love to hear what you think.
If you’re still not seeing the new homepage and you’re using the Meta Branded theme, head over to your interface preferences and make sure Default Home Page is set to (default).
Hmm. I definitely like how this looks but the videos being in my face feel weird. I don’t think a lot of people are coming to Meta to watch webinar replays or whatever else so I feel like we could benefit from more topics or something else and putting those off to the right side block below top users.
Maybe you have changed the homepage in your preferences? https://meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/interface Is “Default Home Page” (default) for you? I set mine to latest a few years ago when someone accidentally changed the homepage on Meta to /categories
Thanks for the feedback! We thought it would be helpful to surface educational content around community building for folks who might not otherwise come across it. It’s at the bottom to keep it out of the main flow, but we’ll keep an eye on how it feels and adjust it if others aren’t getting any value out of it.
It’s not something we’re planning to package up for reuse at the moment. The theme is pretty specific to Meta and is still evolving. Feel free to test it out here and let us know if you spot any issues.
It should show the same layout for both anon and logged in users. I would double check this setting as @Moin suggested:
Some important context to keep in mind with these changes is that we’re trying to make Meta appealing to a wider audience because historically it’s been heavily focused on development and developers. So part of this includes adding a wider variety of content that could also be interesting to admins and community managers.
The new extra info is great for the Home page – it’s nice to have a more inclusive dashboard. And it’ll be easy enough to flip back to Topics rather than Home as I catch up on things through the day.
Wow! I am really enjoying using the new meta branded theme, especially with the new homepage with blocks. Nice job everyone who’s worked on getting us to this point!
I’d recommend going ahead ASAP and updating everyone’s interface preferences so they start seeing the meta branded theme and new blocks as their homepage. It will annoy some old timers for sure but it will help them see and understand the logic behind all the changes that you are making. They can always change it back again if they don’t like it!
I’d also like to see the /latest and /categories pages get the same treatment, so some of the same guidance is provided there too. Categories page looks a little bare compared to the new home page!
We just added a “Home” link to the top of the sidebar. It will always navigate to the default homepage. If you set a personal homepage then clicking the logo or just browsing to the root domain will still direct to your preferred page.
Sorry about that. This should be fixed now. A recent core update changed how the custom homepage model is handled, which caused a conflict with the theme. We’ve updated the theme on our end and everything should be working again.
If you’re still not seeing the new homepage and you’re using the Meta Branded theme, head over to your interface preferences and make sure Default Home Page is set to (default).
