Updating how categories are organized on Meta

Site feedback
1

As part of updating meta’s theme and structure, we are planning to make some changes to the organization of categories here.

We’ve explored a few different ideas so far, and we expect this will still go through some additional revisions as we get feedback from the community, but the idea that we’re leaning towards now is illustrated below:

meta-redesign-2026-categories-v1
meta-redesign-2026-categories-v11391×867 106 KB

The basic idea is to group related categories into a smaller number of top level categories, each of which would be in the sidebar for new users by default.

  • News and Events
  • Support
  • Community Success
  • Contribute
  • Customization
  • Documentation
  • Community wiki
  • Marketplace

We expect Support to continue to be one of the most active categories, and think it may reduce choice paralysis to group other support related categories underneath it. There are probably further refinements worth making here (should SSO be a category or a tag? what’s the difference in practice between Installation and Hosting? should those be collapsed into a single Self Hosting subcategory?) We’ll work through those questions as we go, but the general shape is to have all support topics in one place.

Community Success is a category we’d love to invest in more, building upon the existing Community category. We see this as a place where everyone involved in running a successful Discourse community can support each other, not with technical support, but with the messy soft stuff of what it takes to build a successful community. We’ll likely reshape the underlying structure here too, but for starters, we think the existing Community and Data and Reporting categories are the main pillars here.

Contribute is the category we envision being the center for discussion about how to improve the product itself, and this community.

Customization would be a place to find all topics related to extending Discourse with plugins, themes, components and other extensions.

If you’d like to take a closer look, we have this structure currently in place on a staging site where you can take a look around.

how to access the staging site
  1. Visit https://meta-redesign-2026.discourse.group/
  2. Enter this user and password for HTTP basic auth
    • user: meta2026bsbx
    • pass: Q0U1ppbVbd2MVttuYOl+M8SYEOUqGLGjzl5sr1C9XwE=
  3. Enter your email/username and password for meta
    (the staging site does not support any other login methods).

After you’ve had a chance to do so, please let us know what you think here.

Updating Meta's theme and structure
2

I think that having a category called something like self-hosting might help make it clear what goes there. It’s still not a great name, but it’s better than Installation, which implies discourse has never worked; I was quite confused the first time one of my topics got moved there. Maybe “back-end” would work?

If you access a shell to cause or witness your problem, it goes there. If discourse “works” and it’s something to do with ux or themes or anything else, it goes on support.