SameBoat — Pinned Welcome & Showcase Page
This is your polished, shareable landing page: welcome header + six category tiles + moderator-recruitment CTA. It works as native Discourse HTML — no scripts, no theme fighting, renders first time.
How to create it
- On your forum, click + New Topic (your “Ask a Question” button).
- Title:
Welcome to SameBoat — start here - Category: General (or wherever you want it pinned)
- In the editor toolbar, you need the HTML / source view. Easiest method:
- Just paste the HTML block (below) straight into the post body. Discourse’s editor accepts inline-styled HTML in posts.
- If it shows the raw code instead of rendering, that’s fine on preview — when you publish, it renders. (If your editor has a
</>or “rich/markdown” toggle, make sure you’re NOT in a plain-code mode.)
- Publish the topic.
- Then pin it: open the published topic → click the wrench/admin icon → Pin Topic → choose “pin globally” if you want it on the homepage list, or pin to the category.
The HTML to paste
(See the file pinned_showcase.html — paste its entire contents into the post body.)
Editing later
Every tile, colour, icon, link, and description is plain text inside the HTML. To change one, find the category name in the block and edit the text around it. The links use your real category URLs.
Why this works (and the homepage injection didn’t)
Discourse posts allow inline-styled HTML — styling baked into each tag. The homepage injection needed a script to insert elements and find a place to put them, which Horizon (a locked, newer theme) resisted. This approach sidesteps all of that.
The homepage itself
Leave the native category boxes for now — they work and look decent. The cheap, robust win there later is giving each category a colour + icon (per-category setting, like Online Safety’s cyan). The literal “tiles on the homepage” is a clean job for a Discourse developer in Phase 2 if you still want it — or revisit whether to move off the locked Horizon theme to an editable one.