Discourse now has a sidebar:
You can customize the categories and tags that show up in the sidebar:
The sidebar makes it much easier to get to chat channels and other things quickly, but can be collapsed with the hamburger menu if you need more space.
I had to sign back in again today perhaps due to the upgrade. But sidebar is cool.
There is also a new notification widget that allows you to filter on notification type – maybe old version had that too, but it looks different:
