In 2024 I was looking for work. I decided to offer my services as a community consultant . Mostly, though, people were interested in technical help getting their Discourse sites fixed or updated. One potential client asked if I could add a contact form for people who didn’t have an account to send fe…

[image] jericson: [Failed to load plugin discourse-contact-plugin from http://localhost:4200/assets/js/plugins/discourse-contact-plugin_main-r9hlw1h8.digested.js Error: Could not find module imported from] [image] jericson: This was in March and that means I ought to have had until basic…

I went though the same thing with many plugins I had written. I didn’t have the bandwidth to modernize them to the Discourse standard. I have a data science-type job so while I know software engineering concepts, I don’t keep up-to-date with the specifics of web dev stuff. In the end I didn’t update…

[image] Moin: I think you got the error because of this bug, not because your plugin needed an update right now Does seem likely. Getting on the latest ESR (and being a bit more vigilant testing) seems like a good plan from now on. [image] piffy: I think with the advent of agentic coding…

[image] jericson: Why hasn’t the plugin tutorial been updated for instance? because we are a fairly small team maintaining a behemoth of a codebase and having to implement new features for paying clients, all the while providing support and keep things working for our open source community. T…

Thanks for the detailed info @jericson . As you say, Discourse is in a very different position to OpenSSL both in terms of usage & position in the stack. It’s a constant balancing act of progress, customizability, and stability. There’s no perfect solution that will make everyone happy, but we’re alw…

[image] chapoi: because we are a fairly small team maintaining a behemoth of a codebase and having to implement new features for paying clients, all the while providing support and keep things working for our open source community. Totally understand. [1] I really like Discourse and I wrote th…

[image] jericson: For instance, the tutorial could be turned into wiki posts so that people like me can update them. Why does it need to be a wiki for that? The developer documentation is managed via GitHub. I like the process where the changes are reviewed even more than a wiki. [image] D…

I agree that the plugin documentation should be updated at this point. The goal of the “depreciation” time period where the plugins still work but the site puts up a warning that they will break soon is to give the plugin authors enough time to fix them. Yet in that time period, a team of full-time …

[image] piffy: The goal of the “depreciation” time period where the plugins still work but the site puts up a warning that they will break soon is to give the plugin authors enough time to fix them. Yet in that time period, a team of full-time paid developers couldn’t update the core plugin deve…

[image] david: Just to clarify on this point: the deprecation timeline for hbs has only started recently. The earliest we’ll consider dropping support is after the next ESR (end of July). So yes, we should’ve updated the documentation sooner, but this isn’t a case of ‘dropping support without en…

Case study of an amateur plugin author

Development

Moin May 3, 2026, 11:14pm 2

I think you got the error because of this bug, not because your plugin needed an update right now

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Case study of an amateur plugin author

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