Best Discourse plugins

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What are your favorite plugins for Discourse? What do you think are the must-haves?

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I think the team has done a pretty good job of ensuring that all essential functionality is rolled into the core product. It’s almost the opposite of platforms such as WordPress, where there are certain essential plugins for basic functionality. To that end I’m not sure there are any ‘best’ plugins, although there are many which do do an excellent job of showcasing how Discourse can be extended.

It’s pretty good news to someone like myself, as the act of installing a plugin typically incurs a brief window of downtime while rebuilding the app. There are ways to build out an environment which minimize this impact, but they definitely aren’t recommended when first getting to grips with the system.

There are very few if any common plugins across the 100+ instances which I have built over the past seven years. It very much depends on the use cases that you’re looking to support as to what might be useful.

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There are many and I think you shouldn’t just blindly install plugins. As said above, find your use case and then find the plugin. Saying that, here is a huge repository with a lot of them: https://github.com/discourse/all-the-plugins/tree/master/plugins

Be warned though, that some may be deprecated, so it’s important to also go to the discourse page and see if the developer has said any issues with compatibility.

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As a general rule you will be covered by core plus any plugin labelled #official

Those are plugins we deem stable enough to host on our infra.

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I have installed:

My personal preference is to make the image for the Welcome badge fun (I have a fleur-de-lis image) and I use that badge on my usercard. All of the badge images on my forum were selected with an eye for the user card secondary use. The Certified (epaulet image) and Thank You (rainbow) badges are most popular for that.

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Hi @ArcticF0xx

As mentioned in passing by @Stephen, features and functionality outside the Discourse core are driven by the use case of each individual Discourse community.

For example, a tech forum based on coding or configuration may need some special plugins for BBCODE tags or additional custom MARKDOWN support. These plugins would be the “favorite, must have plugins” for a subgroup of Discourse forums, but would be “worthless” to other forums.

The same is true for other specialized plugins.

For example in the reply by @elijah, he lists discourse-spoiler-alert as a “must have”; but the Discourse forums I have worked with have no use for that plugin and no reason to install it.

As @HAWK, said:

As a general rule you will be covered by core plus any plugin labelled #official

But for specialized Discourse use cases, and designs of your own vision and individual dreams, what is “the best of the best” for one type of forum is not necessary good for another use case.

If you really want relevant answers, you should describe exactly what is your forum, your goals and vision for that forum and for the “use case” of your forum.

But to ask a general question, across the universe of forums, as follows:

What are your favorite plugins for Discourse? What do you think are the must-haves?

… this is way too general, in my view, to get any useful information.

In closing, @AntiMetaman is correct, when he replies:

There are many and I think you shouldn’t just blindly install plugins. As said above, find your use case and then find the plugin.

All I am doing is echoing the wisdom of these replies. Do not install plugins for the sake of installing plugins. Do not install plugins them because others recommend them. Install plugins because they are required for you to fulfill the mission objective of your forum.

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Yup. For inspiration, here are the most popular ones I think?

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Thanks for chiming in everyone! I mostly wanted inspiration from the community to get a glimpse into how folks are using plugins, not necessarily seeing how I could replicate what others are doing.

You’ve all provided useful links and resources, which I’ll review to see if there are any plugins I should be testing on my own forum.

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