I’ll try to dispel the myths that discourse doesn’t need a built-in blog. I believe that abandoning a blog in the core of discourse carries more negative consequences than blog in discourse. There are dozens of topics on this page where users wonder why discourse doesn’t have a built-in blog. For more than 5 years, users have been searching for blog functionality in the forum!
1. Discourse doesn’t need a blog at all.
Your competitors will be happy. Without a blog, we lose traffic and visitors. All forums have articles. Basically it’s the instructions and quick start guide. Instead of writing them as forum topics, it would be much more correct to design them in the form of a blog. The Invision Community developers were wise. They added the blog to the core and now it has become their advantage over other forums.
2. You can use wordpress or another platform. Using Discourse instead of WP comments is a good way to drive blog traffic to your forum.
Yes, but we spend our time and money installing and constantly maintaining two platforms instead of one. And this applies not only to wordpress, other platforms are even more complicated. Instead of one successful project with good SEO indicators, we get 2 projects with unpredictable indicators. Instead of one platform, users visit 2 platforms, the traffic of each platform is lower than one, the positions in search engines fall and the traffic becomes even lower. We lose traffic, not attract it. Your competitors are happy again) At the same time, we lose the ability to conduct collective blogs and other advantages, such as the use of tags, PUSH notifications. Our PWA doesn’t work for blogs! Wordpress has redundant functionality, we need a few database lines and a few MB of code. Unfortunately, wordpress is not an Easter cake from which you can cut a piece.
3. Wordpress is better for writing blogs.
Are you serious? We don’t know that yet. The developers of discourse are cool guys, they will tear up wordpress or something else with their eyes closed.
4. Blogging in the core of discourse will complicate the platform.
We live in the 21st century, everything is complicated here. The blog module is not artificial intelligence. A blog is the simplest thing you can add. But it is easier to write a whole module for integration with WordPress to pull useless ballast on the subdomain. It’s a step back. 20 years ago, such a decision would have been correct, but not now. How much will the blog module for discourse weigh? How many tables will appear in the database? I will answer: a little. I don’t expect a blog to have millions of posts. But if you have millions of posts, then I will congratulate you.
5. Forums can be flooded with spam links.
Assign trusted people, not everyone. Instead of developing the community, we need to pull the ballast in the form of an ancient blog on wordpress. We need to be distracted by blogging on our own. We lose the opportunity to use the creativity of the community to write great articles. There may be many members of the community can write free blogs better than us.
6. Discourse and blog are designed for different purposes.
The blog is needed to attract traffic. Guess what the forum needs for its development?
7. It can be much easier for users to scroll through and read only blog posts than to be distracted by all the content created by users on the forum.
In the creepy way that discourse is used as a blog engine, I agree. Many ways have been devised. It’s simple, you need a separate module with its own navigation and page. Making posts from forum topics is equivalent to making posts from chat messages. I’ll give you an example of invision community, although they have a terrible design. It is very convenient to add comments, likes, tags, a subscription to news, a link to a product from an online store, etc. to a blog post. From such posts, it would be wiser to build wiki pages. In reality, you can find more advantages, but for now, this is enough.
When choosing an engine for my community, I needed a built-in blog and I really didn’t want to look for another platform, as I liked discourse. I really hope that the developers will hear our requests and help make this wonderful platform better.
