Unboxing Discourse 3.5

After six months of steady improvements in our beta releases, we’re excited to announce our latest release, Discourse 3.5. This release, we focused on improving both the member and community management experience. We’ve rolled out Horizon, our sleek modern theme; a new composer option that makes creating and responding to topics simpler; streamlined color management with updated dark mode settings; automatic site translations; and much more.

Keep reading for all the details!

Not set up with Discourse yet? Start a free trial, install it yourself, or discover how others use the platform.

🌅 Horizon: A new, modern Discourse theme

Horizon is built to give your community a great out-of-the-box experience. We like it so much, we made it the default theme. We’ve included simpler color palette creation and management to make matching your branding more intuitive than ever. 

• A new look: Designed from the ground up to provide a clean and modern look that places your community and content front and center.
• Simpler color management: Color palettes are much easier to manage, allowing you to make sure your site looks the way you want for all your members.
• Better dark mode support: Dark and light modes are now easily configurable for each theme, and users can manage their preferred color options with ease.

Learn more about Horizon and the recent color palette updates, and let us know what you think.  

📝The new composer: A more flexible way to write in Discourse

We wanted to make composing topics and responses in Discourse more intuitive and familiar, without losing the experience many users already enjoy.  The new composer combines everything into a single window and lets you toggle between the updated interface and the classic double window markdown view whenever you like.  It delivers a consistent, full-featured editor on every device, complete with easy formatting, media uploads, and editing tools.

• Visual and flexible: Compose posts with familiar formatting buttons, drag-and-drop media, or just type markdown—each user can choose for themselves.
• Mobile-optimized: The composer is full-screen on mobile for a distraction-free writing experience.
• Accessible and powerful: Keyboard shortcuts, easy link editing, image resizing and captioning controls, and dynamic toolbars keep everyone productive.

For all the details, check out the new composer announcement post. 

🌏 Automatic translations: Multilingual communities just got easy

Running a multilingual community? Discourse now features powerful automatic translations, leveraging the latest AI models to make community interactions work smoothly across languages.

• Seamless language support: Members can choose their language with a dropdown, view translated content instantly, and even write in their own language when replying regardless of any other languages used in the discussion.
• Quality controls: Admins and moderators can review flagged translations to maintain a top-notch experience for members of all languages.
• Simple setup: Turn on localization and select your languages—no other configuration needed—to have translation workflows and review tools ready to go.

Find out more in the automatic translations announcement post.

And so much more…

Every Discourse release is packed to the brim with fun and useful enhancements; if we covered each and every improvement, this post would be so long nobody would read it all! That said, here are a few other updates worth noting:

• We’re bringing faster, smarter topic search and filtering to all Discourse sites with the improved /filter route 
• Find and manage our most popular plugins easier now that they’re bundled with Discourse core.
• Streamlined site configuration with site settings that can now be saved in bulk.
• Our new comprehensive admin search tool  makes it a breeze to find the setting, page, plugin, or component that you need.
• Site logos and your preferred fonts are easier to set up and manage than ever before.
• Developers can take advantage of the type: object settings schema for plugins, enabling more developer-friendly plugin creation.
• The light and dark mode toggle theme component has been moved into core, making it available to all sites.
• Now there’s more effective compliance with evolving legislation by updating the text displayed to people flagging content, which can now be modified by site admins.
• Global settings that depend on your theme can be configured on individual themes - the first setting for this is the new welcome banner that shows at the top of your home page.
• More logical organization of admin settings and pages, making individual options easier to find.
• Personalize your community even more with custom category icons
• Updates to Discourse moderation tools are on their way and to start, the review queue has received some incremental improvements to make moderation easier.

Check out the release-notes tag to get a detailed breakdown of every change introduced in the betas leading up to this release, or see the full release notes for this update.

Update to the latest — in just one click, as usual 

If you are on our hosting, you’re already on 3.5! Otherwise, updating is as easy as clicking the update button linked from your Discourse admin page or by following the email we send reminding you to do so. 

As a part of our security policy, we run a public exploit bounty program at Hacker One to strengthen our goal to make every Discourse site secure by default. If any security issues are reported to us, we prioritize them and investigate thoroughly. 

Still not set up with Discourse yet? Start a free trial, install it yourself, or discover how others use the platform.

Thank you contributors 🙏

We always like to conclude by thanking those who make Discourse an awesome open-source project. Many thanks for all the code contributions in this release from:

angusmcleod, Lhcfl, Arkshine, moin-Jana, tvavrda, jmperez127, benoittgt, n-rodriguez, merefield, mdoggydog, kevinhwang, jonaharagon, jahan-ggn, gormus, zhanfengzeng, willnode, vpolozov, tomvanenckevort, suvodhoy, solracsf, sebix, richardTowers, rahul-rakesh, pfaffman, pangbo13, nvh0412, notriddle, nonZero, nolosb, mwaniki-wairungu, moggleif, michael-accredible, maximevtush, joaoalber, jcharaoui, jancernik, jBouyoud, geckolinux, fabiiretro, elmuerte, dsims, communiteq, bquast, bluefroguk1, baweaver, a2937, YukiNeko-hime, NeilHanlon, NateDhaliwal, MarineBaron, Juanc1to, JsBergbau, Ahmedgagan, ABHIRAMSHIBU

Huge thanks to our translators who generously contributed their time, effort, and love to translate Discourse into numerous languages for this release. We pay professional translators on top of volunteer efforts to make sure all our translations are of the highest quality and that Discourse is more accessible with every step forward.

We hope you enjoyed our roundup of Release 3.5! If you are curious to learn more, stay up to date with our latest announcements to find out about new features as we work on them.

See you in the next version of Discourse 👋