Discourse is, of course, a forum software, but for years I wished there was a simple way to display in the homepage the first posts of topics in a certain category (like “Blog”) in a blog-like manner (sort of like how the posts in a topic are dislayed).
I’ve tried to do this by using Topic List Thumbnails together with Topic List Excerpts but no matter how I tweaked this setup, the result was always clunky.
After investigating countless themes and components, I’ve decided that the simplest way to do this to my liking is to use Custom Homepage for Groups, and do my blogging inside a single topic displayed on the homepage.
After installing the component, I:
- Made a topic called “Homepage”
- Set the Custom default homepage to
/t/homepage/2770/999999(2770 being the topic number, and 999999 an arbitrarily large number that will always redirect to the latest post
Two caveats:
-
As in a normal Discourse topic, the posts are displayed from the first (oldest) down to the latest (newest) post. So to see the older posts, you have to scroll up not down (as in a normal blog). Kind of funky, but that’s the way it is. Apparently, there is no way to display posts inside a topic in reverse chronological order.
-
Oneboxing internal topics doesn’t work like oneboxing external articles, so if I write a long article and link it from the Homepage, it displays differently (worse) than, say, a Wikipedia article. See the two examples below.
Despite that, I like this setup so much better than the Thumbnal/Excerpts method. I think I’m going to stick with it for a while.