User-specific Discourse home page

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

I would like a way to give individual users the ability to have any page as their home page.

Background

Currently, we can set the default homepage to be one of several views, and users can personalise this:

User preference for default home page

Users can now set their own preference for their homepage. If you’d rather land on New instead of Latest when going to forum.example.org you’ll want this setting. [27] Head to user preferences -> interface and select the home page you want Implemented per: Remember the selected view / tab on homepage to @notriddle for implementing

Using a plugin by @syl, the default home page can be any page within the Discourse instance:

Discourse-home-page

discourse-home-page This Discourse plugin allows to set any existing Discourse page (a topic, a category, etc.) as the home page of your Discourse instance. The repo is here: https://github.com/sylque/discourse-home-page This plugin is especially useful when used with DiscPage. Settings discourse_home_page_enabled : set to true to enable the plugin discourse_home_page_path : path of the home page. For example /t/12 will set the home page to topic 12 and /c/5 will set the home page…

Alternatively, using a theme component by @pfaffman can allow you to use any page:

Allow Arbitrary Homepage (by Jay Pfaffman)

https://github.com/pfaffman/discourse-allow-arbitrary-homepage Well, @hellekin thought that this deserved its own topic. I’m not quite sure it’s ready for such, but here it is. I’ll have a look at stuff early next week and try to make sure that it looks like something that other people could really use. As he said:

My use-case

In our login-only instances, we have groups that almost exclusively use the instance for their own private category. I’d like to make that category their homepage. There are a whole bunch of potential groups like this, each with their own category. This is an alternative to having an unmanageable number of instances, and will still allow access to the wider forum when needed.

The way forwards

What would be the best way to get this done on a per-user basis, combining the existing per-user functionality with the ability to use alternate pages?

Doing this per group (such as @neil’s Groups can set category and tag notification levels) would be absolutely lovely.

[merefield (Robert)]

That’s an interesting idea.

Sounds like you are going to need to:

• elaborate on your requirement detailing the exact desired functional behaviour for all use cases and any additional UI (the examples are useful but you need to be specific about what you want). I have an idea but you’d need to state it in black and white.

Then:

• persuade Discourse team to include it OR
• get a freelance developer to build it for you. They might also help you develop your requirement.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

So what you want is if someone is a member of a group you’ll change home to the category associated with that group? The theme component that I developed is a good start for doing that, however, it appears that it’s broken. Right now, I’m the only one using it (I mean, I am the only user, so not even more users than me are using it on my site), so it’s not been a priority to fix it.

If it worked, it would apply the home url override only for members of a group, so it should be reasonably easy to modify it to support multiple groups and home pages, given that it’s easy to resolve whatever the problem is.

If you’ve got a budget, feel free to contact me or post in #marketplace.

[merefield (Robert)]

Just in case anyone is interested, I built this plugin that uses your Primary Group to set your homepage to be the Category that’s set up for that Primary Group, resulting in a “User-specific” (aka Group specific) homepage.

https://github.com/merefield/discourse-category-home

It’s not battle tested and I’m not sure if I will support it unless someone wants to fund the work, but feel free to install it and try it out :). If you like it, at least it

[davidkingham]

This will be very useful for a site I’m working on, if the site takes off I’ll be happy to help with the maintenance. Thanks Rob!

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

I was working on a theme component to do the same!

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

I see that you have done so now:

GitHub - pfaffman/discourse-custom-homepage-for-groups: Discourse theme...

I look forward to having a play!

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

It works nicely!

The only issue that I see with it is not having an easy path back to the ‘standard’ homepage.

This can be mitigated in a few ways, ensuring that there is a prominent link to /latest or /categories as you see fit.