Navigation Sidebar and Hamburger menu

You will find the ≡ (aka, ‘the hamburger’) menu has moved from the right, to the left side of the top-bar. When you click/touch it, a side-bar moves in—it’s no longer a drop-down style menu.

This also brings us a more powerful Avatar dropdown. Notably, you can now choose different types of notifications to wade through your notifications more quickly.

This is an experimental feature that Discourse has been testing for some time. I think it’s better overall so I’d like to run with it here on PodComm.

Note that the ≡ sidebar has some configuration options in your preferences.

  • avatar menu
  • then the profile-silhouette at bottom
  • then Preferences
  • then way down the left is Sidebar

I love that this new ≡ side-bar does not scroll away! The old ≡ disappeared or scrolled away very quickly. This new sidebar stays around—just touch/click ≡ to make it go away—so you can use it to navigate more readily.

I dislike that the ≡ is now at the extreme top-left. That’s where well-designed user-experiences put the “take me back to the front of this entire web site” button—our “P” logo.

I dislike that the Avatar menu has gotten even more complicated. It has another click required to get down into your preferences.
ɕ

updated to add: Yes, there’s a bug with the little icons that appear next to categories in the sidebar. I’m looking into it.

I’m not sure if anyone even noticed this experiment… but I’m going back to the normal Discourse appearance.

The big problem for me, was that the new sidebar had these [utterly useless] colored blocks next to the categories, and the Discourse team isn’t clear on if/how/when that might change. This category listing is intolerable to me, as follows…

So we’re back to having our ≡ (“hamburger menu”) at the right. With our friendly and meaningful icons next to categories, as follows…

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