Conversation traffic lights and key - Coloured backgrounds for threads/Tasks

We want to be able to change the background colour of each thread on the platform with that colour being defined by its tag.

For example:

Background colour: Tag
Green: open
Orange: shaping
Red: building

There should also be a small key in each category with this Green: open
Orange: shaping
Red: building written in text matching colours and a modal when clicked to explain further what each colour means to the user.

This is to aid productivity in a decentralised governance structure as new members posting with new ideas into a thread where good work is taking place requires those who are doing the work to stop and discuss the new idea, slowing progress.

For that reason we want to be able to label our discussion threads:

  • open for all ideas
  • open for shaping meaning users should read previous comments and discuss the ideas presentented
  • building, meaning all discussion is focused on building the ideas previously discussed

Ofcourse new ideas are always welcome but in the shaping and building phases new ideas should be posted as their own thread so they don’t interrupt productivity

The simplest and most useful way to do this would be to have an array like this:

[ enter tag ] - [ enter background colour ]
[ enter tag ] - [ enter background colour ]
[ enter tag ] - [ enter background colour ]

and a + key to enter more fields.

The more people who find this useful the more chance others will build on it and help to support it.

I would suggest reviewing the Discourse Kanban plugin which sniffs the page for tags and creates columns if it finds them. You can probably pull all of that functionality out and use it in this plugin rather than coding it from scratch.

Here’s the standard way to add CSS rules to Discourse which will probably help with this task: Make CSS changes on Your Site - admins - Discourse Meta

Its probably better to build this as a ‘Theme Component’ rather than a ‘Plugin’, although that is your own choice.

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