Current Projects - December 2024
Welcome to Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse. (We missed November, but we’re back and still aiming to do these every month).
Your questions and feedback are welcome!
Kicking off
Support for multiple drafts
Currently, Discourse only supports one topic draft at a time. We’re starting a project to remove this limitation so that you can have multiple drafts going at once. This change will make it easier to write in Discourse, since you won’t have to worry about completing an entire topic in one go or composing your work in another tool first.
Admin config pages for site appearance
We’ve been deep in planning an extensive set of improvements to how admins can configure the look and feel of their sites. This includes a new layout for the config pages relating to branding, as well as themes and theme components, with a special focus on colour palettes. The plans for this have become more firm over the past few weeks, and we’re getting started with developing these exciting new interfaces.
In full swing
Composer redesign
We’ve made a lot of progress over the past month by defining our design direction, choosing ProseMirror as our editor library, and completing a good deal of refactoring to ensure moving to our new composer goes smoothly. Soon, we will begin internal testing of the initial version of our redesigned composer soon and implement improvements to the composer toolbar.
Admin interface design consistency
We’re continuing our work on improving the consistency of the admin interface based on the design patterns we have settled upon. These updates are making navigating the admin a more consistent and pleasant experience.
Chat with Ask Discourse directly from your site on our hosting
We’ve expanded ask.discourse.com to now be usable directly from your site. You can now ask discourse_ai Discourse related questions via chat. We hope this adds to an even easier way to get help right when you need it.
Experimental rollout of AI features on our hosting
We have started experimentally rolling out Discourse AI features. If enabled, customers will not need a 3rd party Large Language Model (LLM) provider as Discourse will provide a hosted open-weights LLM solution. We are using these experiments to learn about handling hosted LLM volume and to drop barriers so more people can adopt AI features.
Wrapping up
Simplified invites
We have made the process of creating and sending invites friendlier and easier to use, with some of the most common flows improved, and advanced features simplified.
New full screen pages for signup and login
After thoroughly testing our new full screen signup and login pages (thanks to everyone who contributed to that effort!), we’re ready to begin rolling out these new screens. If you’re ready to make the change now, you can do so by enabling the full page login setting.
Short summaries on topic lists
Iterating on short AI summaries for hot topics, we have now expanded support across all topic lists, toggleable on or off anytime by the user. Expect this to be out soon for you!
Better pageview tracking for all sites on our hosting
After sharing Understanding pageview tracking on hosted plans on Meta, we’ve now finished moving all our hosted customers over to an improved way of tracking and reporting pageviews that doesn’t count crawlers and other traffic toward the pageview limits on their plan. This also provides more detailed insights into site traffic, see Understanding pageviews and the site traffic report.
Sunsetting NSFW/Toxicity for AI triage
We will soon be officially removing NSFW and Toxicity features from Discourse AI. We are now recommending customers use AI triage via the Automation plugin for a superior performing and customizable experience. We already have guides on Meta on how to use it to combat spam and detect NSFW/Toxicity content.
Easier developer environment setup with Dev Containers
We’ve made it easier to set up a development environment for working on Discourse with Dev Containers. This almost entirely eliminates the need to install/configure Discourse-specific tools/dependencies on your local machine, and makes it very easy to keep up-to-date as Discourse evolves over time. To give it a try, check out the docs.