We’re still fighting our UX issues and an edit to the sidebar would solve it, allowing us to open all the categories to everyone rather than keeping them hidden. Fortunately there is already a plugin which does what we want, it just needs to be expanded as it only works for 5 categories, where we need to use it for about 30.
- Plugin to modify 1
- Plugin to modify 2
(they work together) - Info about plugin 2
Desired behaviour:
Instead of the current system where users create a custom menu and then choose which groups can see it.
- We want to edit the plugin so it says: ‘display category/subcategory to these groups only’.
- The admin then selects a category (the same modal currently there, but set for categories instead)
- Admins add the groups categories are visible to below and the existing modal is perfect for this.
Why
Currently categories and sub-categories are only visible if you join a group which has permission to see them. That silo’s the site and makes too much distance between them. I want to set all groups to being open to the public, but that makes the site far too cluttered.
Discourse’s new navigation sidebar is supposed to fix that UX issue which was troubling most Discourse forums. Instead it turns into a wall of too much information if a large site like ours uses it. I’m a member of most groups and here’s mine to give an example:
That list goes on and on and on. This task allows us to set the sidebar to show users only the groups that they’ve joined, making navigation easy and also to set all categories and sub-categories open to everyone. Currently its either one or the other.