Hello everyone. There was recently a new update to Discourse which allows us to have a new sidebar, navigation and notifications. Please see the image below and the post that follows. Thanks!
Over the years, Discourse has grown to serve a larger set of communication and collaboration needs for diverse groups within the communities that rely upon the platform. Many communities with large numbers of categories and tags are now adding chat channels as well.
As important as it is to have a single place for everyone to interact and see all the latest discussions, it’s just as important for you to have an easy way to stay on top of what is most important to you.
Today we’re introducing a new sidebar and a new notifications menu into Discourse to help you and your community members find and focus on what is most important to you.
The new sidebar lets you customize your navigation so you can get to your favorite parts of your community, and the new notifications menu that lets you more easily decide which of your notifications deserve your attention now and which ones can be dismissed or be saved for later.
These features can be enabled by admins on all communities with experimental site settings that any admins for any community can turn on and are now enabled on Meta.
These new features are still experimental, but will eventually become the defaults for new communities.
New sidebar
The new sidebar includes a community section that has some common links everyone will need to access, and additional sections for your favorite categories and tags, your personal messages, and any chat channels that you’ve joined.
Anonymous users (visitors who are not logged in), see sections for the most popular tags and categories.
Add categories and tags to your sidebar
Click the pencil icon next to the categories or tags sections to be taken to your sidebar preferences page to add categories or tags to your own sidebar. Counts for new and unread topics are shown alongside any categories and tags you choose to add to your sidebar.
Adding categories or tags does not automatically watch or track them, so you won’t get additional notifications unless you choose to do so separately.
New notifications menu
The new notifications menu has tabs for each type of notification so when you’re looking for those two recent replies but have gotten a few more recent likes and mentions, you can find them easily without navigating away from the current page.
Counts for different types of unread notifications are shown on each tab so you can see at a glance what kinds of things may be waiting for you. Dismiss a subset of notifications on a given tab when you want to clear one out but still want to follow up on the others.