As part of the restructuring of the forum, a number of suggestions have been made regarding
restructuring of categories
alternative layouts
tagging
The below suggestion is about the sidebar. Some of you might have seen it in the screenshots for the alternative layouts and those that did visit the staging forum have seen them (although differently).
Your thoughts on this suggestion are, as usual, appreciated.
What can be done with the sidebar
The sidebar provides a convenient place to have access to certain "things" (see image below) by a single click of the mouse. It replaces the hamburger menu at the right top on the current forum. It's highly configurable by both administrator and users.
Do not confuse this with the Community category on the forum. This section is a standard Discourse section and provides easy access to
The latest topics (Everything).
Your posts (My Posts).
Various other shortcuts
HowTo's
This is a custom section and provides links to important topics, mainly aimed at new users of the forum.
Categories
This section can be configured by the user. For now, the default provides shortcuts to the main ctegories of the forum; the user can remove them or add his/her favorite categories.
Tags
This section can be configured by the user. For now, no defaults are set; the user can add his/her tags of interest; the tags that you see are only for demonstration purposes.
Messages
This contains one item (Inbox) that takes you directly to your inbox with PMs.
Custom sections
The current visible section HowTo's is an example of a custom section created by the administrator and will be visiable to all users but can only be modified by the adminstrator. Users however can add their own custom sections; they will only be visiable to the user who created them.
I have mixed feelings about the side bar, mostly because of how I use the forum. Because I don't have room on my desk for two monitors I usually have the forum open in one browser window on the left of the screen and whatever else I am doing on the Web, typically YouTube or the BBC news website in a separate window on the right of the screen, something like this
This makes it easy to see when new posts and/or flags are added
The main forum page is already very busy and although I can see some advantages to the side bar I am not convinced, although the ability to add your own links could come in handy
If I remember correctly it is possible to close the side bar and open it again. Am I remembering correctly ?
Something that should be noted is that a change to a different "navigation menu" design is coming soon regardless:
The forum is currently using the "Legacy" navigation menu design. The menu is opened by clicking the "hamburger" icon at the top right corner of the forum page:
And has this design:
(please ignore the odd categories, the screenshot is from the "staging site" forum where some experimentation with the categories occurs)
Per the announcement I linked above, an upcoming update to the Discourse forum framework used by Arduino Forum will remove that "Legacy" design option, after which we have two choices for the navigation menu design:
Header Dropdown
The one most similar to the current "Legacy" design is the "Header Dropdown" design, which is opened via the hamburger icon at the same location as the "Legacy" design's icon:
Sidebar
For an "apples to apples" comparison, we should also consider the sidebar proposal on its own, independent from the other distinct proposals sterretje is making (using tags for topic categorization and addition of a "HowTo's" section).
This is how the "Sidebar" navigation menu design would look with the forum's current configuration:
The menu shown in your screenshot is the "notification menu". There are no planned or proposed changes to that menu.
This discussion is about which design we should use for the "navigation menu".
The "notification menu" is opened by clicking your avatar at the top right corner of the forum page, while the "navigation menu" is (currently) accessed by clicking the "hamburger" icon below the avatar:
How will a sidebar work for folks who view the forum in less than full screen? For instance, side-by-side looking at the forum for advice on code in the IDE:
It is true that everything under the "Categories" section of the navigation menu (with either design) can also be accessed via the "Categories" page of the forum website. The same is true for the "Tags" section shown in sterretje's screenshot, since all those can also be accessed via a "Tags" page of the forum website (if we decided to start using tags for topic categorization):
However, the specific selection of categories (and tags) shown in the navigation menu (with either of the new designs) can be configured by each user in their preferences:
Something to note is that, in the screenshots previously shared in this topic, we happened to show the sidebar in the context of the "Categories" page. But the sidebar will be available on every forum page. For example:
Actually, this forum load 1.28MB on my browser for each page i open (and my browser already eliminate all the non-relevant parts, trackers, scripts and so on), how much will be added with the sidebar ? ... isn't already a bit too much of html just for open a forum page ?
