Categories can have icons now 😎

[steffahn]

Our Discourse installation got a feature for choosing icons for categories today! I’ve tried to make some reasonable selection from the available icon set so that we can try it out

I personally find it nicer than the plain colored squares, but I wouldn’t mind some feedback from others

Though, if you are more fond of the colored squares, please feel free to share that opinion as well!

Specifically, what could be useful are suggestions for “better” icon choices. We can apparently choose from (almost?) all of the free icons on fontawesome.com, searchable here. I guess, technically – just to mention this option – it should also be possible to upload any other custom svg an an icon^[1] as long as they are free/legal to use.^[2]

E.g. I almost went with some question-mark [ ] for help, but that category appears so commonly, it’d probably be too much "?" appearing everywhere. The speech bubble choice for now also keeps it deliberately square-like, so it’s not that stark of a contrast from before. Another one that’s currently particularly generic-looking is “code review” – it seems non-trivial to me to find a more specific one that still “fits”, but maybe I missed something? E.g. there are a lot of these “file”-related icons^[3], or maybe something (else) from this category^[4] can be preferable, after all?

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And “meta” is also rather arbitrary, I suppose – it’s hard to find a concept for it (one thing of note is that the main page of URLO, when not logged in, prominently features 2 meta posts, the pinned Welcome thread, and Formatting guideline)

I’ve also slightly tweaked some of the category colors^[5], and made category names consistently lower-case. And the list of all categories has a manually defined order now (previously it was always sorted by total number of posts per category). This allows in particular for pushing down "uncategorized" a few places. (IMO it makes little sense when composing a new topic, that you’re immediately (as the second option) presented the option to “not actually choose a category after all”, and you have to scroll past it to see more of the actual categories.) So well – I guess, I’m open to feedback / suggestions on tweaking this ordering, too.

I suppose, we’re also missing a description text for “tutorials”, so if someone wants to suggest a wording or tweak any of the other category description texts I’m happy to adapt any concrete suggestion that look like clear improvements to me!

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1. really, Discourse’s appearance is very customizable anyway, if one puts in the work

   the main thing that’s new is also perhaps better characterized by saying that icons for categories are now a standard feature, and easy to select through the standard site/category settings

   it’s not like a comparable customization (or much more) would have been completely impossible before ↩︎

2. Oh that’s actually pretty cool, I’m learning only now that these “font-awesome” icons – well the free ones at least – are in fact published with CC licenses, so even just additional adjustment(s) or further remixing/combining/transforming these icons something isn’t entirely impossible. ↩︎

3. I’m referring to the top of that page; the linked search result is also containing unrelated stuff ↩︎

4. even though we are addressing how “categories can have icons” in this topic, it looks like those icons also have “categories” ↩︎

5. e.g. "embedded" was too dark, appearing nearly black on light theme, and being very low contrast on dark theme ↩︎

[Vorpal]

The current icons are so small I can't tell what they are supposed to be on my phone (and I almost always use this site from my phone, unless I'm seeking help myself). Apart from the speech bubble for “help“. That one is legible. I have to zoom way in to see what the other ones are supposed to be.

That said, it is not like I memorised which colour is what either. I might remember some colours on internals, but definitely not here.