User-specific Discourse home page

feature
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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:

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

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

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.

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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.
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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. :slight_smile:

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

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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 :star: it :wink:

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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!

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

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I see that you have done so now:

I look forward to having a play!

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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.

1 Like