One discourse instance for multiple purposes

[tpicouet (Thomas Picouet)]

Hi,

I am working for a research entity that provides collaboration tools to researchers or teams to help them working and to stimulate openscience.

One of the tools is getting old so I am prospecting new solutions. It is a WordPress website with several buddy* plugins so that it better looks like a collaboration plateform. One of the buddy* plugins is bbPress which provides the ability to manage forums (but in the very old way you know…).
In this configuration, members from teams can create public or private forum. I know Discourse as simple user for a while and I like how it works so I wonder if we could use this tool instead.

I’ve seen in other topics there is a WP Discourse plugin, but it requires a running instance elsewhere. I have also read we can deal with groups and private categories but as I don’t have any admin account, I can’t experiment this.

My question

Is it possible to easily manage public and private topics?
In particular, is Discourse designed for this purpose or would it be a trick?
I would like to have members belonging to groups and only be able to see/create topics within their own group.

Any feedback is welcome

PS: please forgive my poor english

[fzngagan (Faizaan Gagan)]

@tpicouet

Is it possible to easily manage public and private topics?

Discourse provides group and category level permissions which is far more useful and flexible as compared to role based permissions.

@tpicouet

In particular, is Discourse designed for this purpose or would it be a trick?

Yes, it is designed to fulfil that purpose.

@tpicouet

I would like to have members belonging to groups and only be able to see/create topics within their own group.

Yes, this can be achieved by using correct group permissions on the required categories.

[tpicouet (Thomas Picouet)]

Hi Faizaan and thank you for this fast and exhaustive answer.

I guess we will try it now