Feature topics on your Homepage

Hi, I’ve been using the new “featured topics” widget on a daily basis for the past weeks now. And I just wanted to let you know that I’m really loving it. It is quick and easy to add or remove content, the queue can be moved around easily too and the best thing is that the widget places different amounts of topics automatically into the optimal (desktop) alignment.

The most important improvement suggestion we have at the moment, I’ve already talked about here.

Is the topic “Welcome to Beta” created as an article? Or as a discussion / question? Only the featured images of articles are displayed on the featured topics cards (and in other places). If you insert images in discussions or questions, then they aren’t recognized as such.

Well, I believe that’ll do the trick. Thanks @bjoern_schulze 

Good suggestion, I will add it!

I noticed the same thing

It seems like it was fixed with the rollback @Julian but it’s gone weird again.

Can you ask that it’s rolled back again ASAP. And that your tech guys just stop messing about today?

Welcome to inSpired @heather locke !

It sounds to me as if you’re looking for a handy guide here. 

In particular, here’s the steps you’ll most likely be after.

1. Activate Customization mode

2. Hover over the homepage and determine where you want to add featured topics. Click the plus icon ()  and select the Featured topics widget

3. Add one or more topics via search or by copy/pasting a topic URL. You can add as many topics as you like

4. Select how many topics should be displayed as full-width. If you choose 0 the topic cards will either show in a 2 or 3 column layout depending on the amount of topics

5. Click Done in the sidebar

6. Click Publish. Your featured topic cards will now appear on your homepage

If you get stumped, feel free to give us a shout and we’ll walk you through everything.

Good luck with launching your community too! If you need any advice at all, we’ll be glad to offer it.

No worries.

Don’t forget that if you’ve got access to the staging environment as part of the package, it’s an extremely useful tool for trying out testing and experiments without causing the main forum to implode. Everything you do in the staging environment is kept separate from public and is restricted to moderators only by default.

Don’t be afraid to break staging! That’s what it’s there for. 

@security_lion I think you’d really be better off adding a some HTML, and stealing the code from the featured banner so you can just edit the content. You don’t need to be very familiar with all this to figure this out either:

1. Add the featured banner with a random topic
2. Press cmd+shift+C (Mac Chrome) to inspect the element and steal the code of the banner
3. Remove the topic banner
4. Hit customise and add a HTML widget
5. Do not put a title simply paste in the entire “stolen” code as is
6. Edit the content so that it just says something like “View unanswered questions”
7. Edit the link to be the one you mentioned
8. Publish!

Your HTML would look something like this:

<div class="homepage-widget-container widget-container homepage-widget-container--topic_banner widget-container--topic_banner homepage-widget-container--topic_banner widget-container--topic_banner" data-idx="3">
                <div class="widget-placeholder">
                                        <div><div class="topic-banner_wrapper featuredBanner"><a class="banner-notification_url" href="https://community.insided.com/search/activity/unanswered"></a><div class="box banner-notification notification"><div class="box__content box__pad"><p class="notification-title"><span class="notification-link">View unanswered questions</span></p></div></div></div></div>
     </div>
</div>

The only downside, which might actually be for the best is that this will only appear on the homepage. If you wanted it everywhere you’d have to make it part of your navigation, which is a little more tricky.

Hope this helps!