The discussion revolves around using placeholder forms more frequently in documentation topics on Meta Discourse. Canapin highlights that many documentation posts use discourse.example.com and suggests adopting placeholder-forms to improve usability. pacharanero strongly agrees, praising the component for its utility in documentation, runbooks, and automation, and advocates for its use in self-hosting and sysadmin guides. Moin supports the idea, citing an example where placeholders work well even in automated translations, and also suggests using the official Discourse icon instead of screenshots or emojis for consistency.
Made me think that meta is, partially, a documentation platform.
Searching for example.discourse.com in the documentation returns 46 results (and other topics may use another domain).
Those topics could benefit from placeholders. Single example of a topic with many discourse.example.com mentions: Discourse Doc Categories
What about using placeholder-forms on those topics?
100% agree @Canapin! I’m a big fan of the placeholder-forms component and I use it on all my personal and business Discourses, for documentation, creating Runbooks, and for semi-automating processes which aren’t ready for a Bash script.
Here’s an example that uses a Placeholder Publishing a Material for MkDocs site to Azure, with automatic branch/PR preview deployments - blog - Baw Medical Ltd
I’d love to see articles in Documentation > Self-Hosting and #community-wiki:sysadmins use placeholders wherever there is some text/command to use which needs real-time customisation with user input.
I also like the placeholder component. Use a subfolder (path prefix) to serve Discourse with multiple servers sharing a domain is an example where it’s already used, and the placeholder is also working in the automatic translation (at least in German; I was a little afraid AI could break the formatting).
I would also like to see Discourse icon being used more often instead of tiny screenshots of an icon or using an emoji that looks similar.