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cris.v.gutierrez · 13 May 2022 12:10

The default homepage for a Discourse forum seems to be a feed showing the latest posts, although you can change this to Category view, which recreates the classic forum idiom a bit more accurately in my view:

This is preferable, because in addition to showing the top-level categories to users, you also get the feed of latest posts.

Personally, I think this could still be improved. In this view, clicking on one of the categories takes you to an entirely new page for that category, like this:

I think it would be better if, instead of the categories in the left pane being a bunch of static links, they were 'selectors' that changed what was visible in the right pane to a preview of that category. Here's a limited mockup of what I'm thinking of:

Do you guys think this would be a better layout and website flow? I'm not sure if this exists already as a theme plugin somewhere in the Discourse community, or if it would have to be a custom solution.

Seong · 13 May 2022 12:39

I like these designs, especially the "selectors" functionality. I'm not sure whether someone's made a theme that does it yet, but I'll keep an eye out.

There's a way to display columns of content based on the category or tags. Here's an extreme example (the Kanban Board Theme) which may be really fun to use in a specialised subcategory:

If there isn't a theme that does what we want, we could hack things together using something like the above. But I get the feeling that it's probably a bit more involved to change the front page compared to the view for the individual categories.