It would be nice to have a unified Menubar with Links to
Also, the design of the forums, the homepage, the documentation, and the plugin repo should be similar (Same Logo, Colors, Fonts).
I made this mockup for the Menubar a while ago:
You have my vote.
Yes it should be. We have been working toward this goal slowly for months.
This most certainly should be done. It is a website necessity to be able to access other parts of it from other pages. It also makes the website look more clean, unified and professional.
Now I was thinking of actually keeping something similar to the Discourse menu bar for the entire site that way it looks like the discourse header is simply an extension of the main nav bar rather than two separate bars. Also, for the plugin repo, the menu bar for the login could be styled similar to the discourse one. That would make things look very unified.
I think a second nav bar would be better.
I would not change the discourse bar.
I think you misunderstood me. I was talking about both a second bar and I did not mention changing the discourse bar. I was talking about a second bar similarly styled to the discourse bar so that it doesn’t clash with it and looks like it is supposed to go with it.
That skype window on the screenshot…
Some inspiration:
The navbar of the moodle site looks great: https://moodle.org/
You can see that they integrated it with MediaWiki and JIRA.
I thought about the unified design too. This is what i came up with (quick n dirty 
):
One more bar above the one used for discourse makes it look kind of chaotic, so i tried to avoid it.
The problem is that discourse is using that nav-bar to display the title/category when you scroll down.
So you have to “mod” discourse, and it will probably break with every discourse update.
Look how Ubuntu solved it: http://discourse.ubuntu.com/
Works perfectly here: http://try.discourse.org/
Don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to do that…
I like the design of http://try.discourse.org/ but would add a small yellow line between the two bars, just like my mockup. The stock colours of the top bar look very nice btw.
I like how you used my thread in your first screenshot about me asking what people though of the forums 
.
Don’t worry a unified Sponge design is coming together slowly. I’m one of those working on that. If you’ve whatched the first State of Sponge, Gratimax shows briefly the very first mockup I did for the staff.
I just noticed the new design of the docs. Me likey
Great work so far!