Discourse as a blogging platform

Space and infrastructure
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Continuing the discussion from Virtual spring cleaning:

Discourse can and has been used as a blogging system, A very nice one I might add.
There is even a very nice plugin for it, here is a great write up about using discourse as a blogging platform

Basicly you tag posts that you want to show on the front page as “front page” the content of the first post in a topic is used for the single post on the front page, and when people click the comments, they are taken to the topic in the forums.

I like this system. It reduces the learning curve for our members as they only have to learn one system instead of wordpress and discourse. We can easily give permissions to people to allow them to post to the front page. One less system to maintain and update, universal theme and style, one login, Hopefully more post would be pushed to the front page instead of only me making posts (~150 posts by me 50 by others)

Sites that use Discourse for their blog/front page/comments.

I am not suggesting we do this change now, I don’t want to distract from the current efforts but its an good option IMHO.

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That’s a very good point.

Discourse itself wouldn’t render the interface to the blog but I don’t see any reason why discourse couldn’t be a data source for blog content.

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It also reduces the work threshold for everyone who wants to post. Would make the web site much busier (which I think we need). I like this idea.

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As a full website/blog replacement, I think it’s a bad idea. On the other hand, as a data source for one or more categories, it could work well.

The main reason is also support. Discourse is written in Ruby, and while we have some people around the space that know Ruby, or even Discourse, breaking continuity would generally be a bad idea. Plus, templates and branding are a challenge.

I would also at least wait on propose major overhauls like these until we’ve been able to have somewhat of a discussion on the overall strategy in the long term.

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Grain of salt warning, non-member!

In general I’m in favour of the idea of keeping Discourse as an authoring/organizing/collaborative-filtering mechanism. It’s being used often enough by the community that it’s definitely worthwhile to consider making its use broader, rather than finding some mechanism that meets the desired use case more perfectly, but is as yet completely devoid of community engagement.

It’s worth keeping in mind that “using Discourse as a data source” can be interpreted in multiple ways, here’s a few that I’ve thought of in a couple minutes.

  1. Make queries against its database
  2. Make calls against its API
  3. Scrape content from pages it rendered
  4. Use it as-is, with a skin
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As a datasource in my interpretation could encompass all of the above, but has the aim to embed/integrate the content into the main website. Be it through automatic import/injection/export or otherwise, making it easier to public content, but aggregating it into the main site. (Just because you can use something for a particular purpose, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.)

Also, the person who wrote the plugin to make it possible is a founder of Discourse. In the mean time, anyone is do-ocractically free to implement such an integration system if they feel like it would benefit content generation in general.

EDIT: Disclaimer: I’ve previously embedded rendered wiki pages into another (fairly static) website for this purpose.