Community glossary?

Functie
1

Hi everyone, I’m interested in creating a community glossary w/in discourse. Something like this:

image
image795×331 34.9 KB

I understand that this functionality isn’t part of the core, but is there a plugin that already exists? Or has anyone come up with a creative way to get this done in their forum?

To clarify, I want to add a glossary to my forum – I don’t want to turn a forum into a glossary.

Thanks!

2 likes
2

Would making it a wiki post so what you want?

1 like
3

A wiki post (for the content) with DiscoTOC (for the navigation between letters) would be a pretty good combo

I wonder if this plugin might help in some way

5 likes
4

It could get the job done-ish, but not exactly what I’m thinking. With a glossary page, each word would then be a link to it’s definition, or could have the definition right below the word (maybe accordian to see definition). In the former case, linkifying throughout the site could route a user to the word’s definition page, and in the latter case, to the open accordian.

The above could be done with wikis and a planned framework, but ease of community use would increase if there was a more straightforward way to add a word, rather than a topic. Also, the alphabetical sorter on the top of the page is a nice feature.

2 likes
5

I haven’t worked with DiscoTOC. That might be the way to make this work. Knowledge Explorer plugin is fantastic, but I have to think about how to make it work with the glossary and rest of the site.

1 like
6

There is a linkify theme component. It could do what you want if it’s just a few words. If you are going to have dozens of hundreds you’ll want a plugin

5 likes
7

Just played around with that a little bit and added some CSS to my theme to make glossary links appear in the standard text color with a dotted underline.

a.linkify-word { 
  text-decoration-line: underline; 
  text-decoration-style: dotted; 
  color: $primary; 
  text-underline-offset: 0.1em; 
}

(Browser-compatibility for text-underline-offset is not great yet, but at least on Firefox (Desktop) and Safari it makes this look a little nicer.)

Examples:

4 likes
8

I have been working on a Glossary section for the https://discourse.igkt.net/ forum, and did it this way:

  • Create a category for Glossary entries (in my case #glossary)

  • Start to create Glossary Topics, in my case I’ve created one Topic per concept in the Glossary, but another way to do this would be use fewer Topics, and use Markdown headings so you can use anchor-style links to them. Anything that has a unique link will work.

  • Use the built-in Watched Words feature to Link the glossary word (and any synonyms) to the relevant Topic. (sadly this has to be done manually, unless I come up with an automation for it)

This is a new feature for that forum so feedback will, I’m sure, be forthcoming as to whether it is useful and we get enough glossary coverage, and whether it interferes with the user’s ability to add their own links to these words.

Would love to hear from others who have implemented a Glossary and hear how they did it.

2 likes
9

I’ve had a crack at this too; it is surprisingly difficult to get it to fly for both technical and social reasons.

My tips:

  1. When using watched words, use restrictive Regex - or you’ll get it applied at unhelpful times

  2. Topic templates can be very helpful to encourage a good structure for contributions

  3. You’ll need a champion. Or be prepared to be the champion yourself. Hard graft!

1 like