Current Projects - September 2024

Announcements
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Welcome to our first edition of Current Projects, a new monthly newsletter where we’ll be sharing what we’re currently working on at Discourse.

Our goal is to give you and the wider community some insight into what might be coming next in Discourse so you can stay informed, ask questions, share feedback, and contribute to what’s currently in progress.

Without further ado, here’s what we’re currently up to!

:athletic_shoe: Kicking off

Composer redesign

We are kicking off a new project to redesign the composer for writing topics and posts. We are still in the early research, design, and prototyping phases of this project, but will be sharing more soon with the community as we make further progress. Stay tuned!

New theme chooser in the setup wizard

We are working on a new theme chooser that will give admins on new sites an easier and more visual way to choose from a small set of selected themes. The set isn’t yet finalized, but some of the top contenders for this initial pass include Mint, Isabelle, Air, Graceful, and Fully.

Simplifying invites

We’re picking up some small improvements to the invite system, with a focus on making invites more discoverable and simplifying some of the more common flows for inviting users.

AI summaries for hot topics

We’re starting to work on an experimental feature to allow sites to include short summaries of topics on the hot topic list itself. As the topic feed designed most for discoverability of content within a given community, we are interested in seeing whether this will lead to more engagement from casual members and new visitors to a community.

:golfing_man: In full swing

Admin interface design consistency

We’ve arrived at some new patterns for the design of config areas within the admin interface, that group related sites settings and other configuration together in one place. These design guidelines are documented here. We are continuing to apply these changes throughout the admin interface. At the same time, we’re applying the new text formatting guidelines throughout the interface.

New user card design

We are working on updating the default design for the user card based on the experimental theme component which we had running on meta for some time. Learn more…

Reimplementing topic-list and post buttons

As part of our long-term project to remove ‘raw-hbs’ and ‘widget’ rendering systems from Discourse, we’re working to reimplement the topic-list and the buttons on posts. We’re also taking the opportunity to improve the extensibility of these things for theme & plugin developers. For now, everything is behind feature flags. We’ll be sharing more once we have a clear path forward for the rollout.

Better tools for migrations

We are working on new tools to make it easier and faster to migrate your existing community to Discourse. We’ve recently merged a new converter framework along with an example implementation, and have started to work on adding support for importing into chat as well.

:gift: Wrapping up

New Starter plan on our hosting

We’ve been working on a new plan on our hosting which we’ve just announced that’ll give folks the easiest and fastest way to launch a community with Discourse on our official hosting. Learn more…

New about page design

We recently shipped a new design for the about page. We’re working on wrapping up this round of improvements to the about page, limiting our efforts to small final tweaks in response to the feedback we’ve been getting. It’s still currently opt-in, but we’re planning to change it over to be the new default shortly. Learn more…

New site traffic report

We recently shipped a new report for Site traffic that highlights visits from people instead of traffic from crawlers and bots. This replaces the previous Page views report. Learn more….

Chat notifications improvements

We’ve made a number of improvements to how chat notifications work on Discourse, in particular to how push notifications work on desktop and mobile devices. These improvements include simplifications to the user preferences as well as improvements to the logic for delivering notifications.

Configurable moderation flags

We’ve completed a round of improvements to enable communities to configure their own flags for moderation. Learn more…

Signup and login improvements

We’ve added a progress bar to the signup and login flow, so users can see where they are in the process when there are multiple steps involved like verifying their email address or waiting for an admin to approve their account.

Updated FontAwesome icons

We updated our default icons to use Font Awesome 6. The brings updated styles to existing icons and a number of new icons to choose from for customizations. Learn more…

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I feel sad that the instant search is not in the list. :frowning:

But happy to see too many nice features. Big Thanks for all the discourse team

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Just wanted to say THANK YOU for this newsletter. It’s super helpful to know what is in the works to plan accordingly. It would also be great if we could get some directional timelines for features that are “In full swing” or “Wrapping up”.

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I second this sentiment! I work here, and I learned a bunch from this newsletter! :smiley:

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Seconding what the two posters above me said: an overview like this is great!

Specifically regarding the converter framework: what’s the best way to learn more about this? Reading the source code, I assume? Or is there any write-up on this already?

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Yeah, we learned a lot from the experiments we did, but we weren’t sure at the end of it whether it was the right direction, and it was more clear that it would require a significantly larger investment to figure that out, so we had to pause it.

Other things we’re doing with AI may still lead back to search improvements in other ways. But we’ve had to set this down for now.

We aren’t ready to start forecasting on a time basis, but I think the monthly cadence for these updates should help us get a feel for it together over time.

At the moment, that linked pull request is probably the best thing available to learn more details. I think the folks working on it will share once things are a bit further along – they’ve just been pretty heads down getting things done.

Is there anything in particular you’re interested in learning more about this project?

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The main thing I was looking for is how the different types of data would be migrated.
We’re currently looking at moving a forum from SMF2 to Discourse and the importer has a number of gaps (private messages, polls, links to individual posts), so I was wondering if it would make sense to look at the new converter framework. However, checking the code, it seems that it might still be a bit early - if I got it right, mostly the basic infrastructure is in place right now, and actual converter samples would probably come only later?

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Love this initiative and in particular I’m excited to see work on overhauling the composer! Go CDCK team! :rocket:

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I think you’re probably right that the thing to do for now is to sit tight, but let me check on whether we have any sense of what’s between where we are now and where we’d need to be to recommend that others use this framework to start building their own converters. Will circle back with more info or someone more knowledgable about that to speak to it directly.

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Indeed this newsletter combined with Daily Summary really enhances learning what’s new here

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This is a great initiative.

Is there a specific place / channel for users to add ideas / feature requests?

Cheers. Mike

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@ondrej put together this wiki topics on that very subject a couple days ago: Writing an effective feature request, a step by step guide

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I’m looking forward to the update in the composer. It was a change I’ve been waiting for a long time. I hope it will be a change like https://playground.lexical.dev/. Is there any information about this?

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You are right, there’s no documentation yet, and the implementation still has many missing parts. It will take a few more months until it’s in a state where I’d recommend using it for an actual migration.

The first converter we’ll be shipping initially will be a “Discourse” converter. It’s intended as a reference implementation and replacement for the current Discourse merger script. We’ll might ship an SMF2 converter in the future, but it’s not at the top of our list. So, you’d either need to create it yourself, wait for a contribution from the community, or hope that a customer pays us to migrate from SMF2.

So, if you want to do the migration right now, I suggest sticking with the existing import script and maybe adding the missing features you need for the migration.

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Ok, thanks! In that case it does seem like sticking with the current script and enhancing it where necessary makes more sense.

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We’re looking into Lexical as a potential option for us to integrate with in our updated composer — but we haven’t yet made our final decision there. We should have that decision made quite soon so I’ll plan to follow up here once we know more.

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lexical is good. I spent a lot of time with it. But it is still somewhat tied to react. So you would have to introduce react into the frontend. It is supposed to be usable from vanillajs and possible to be integrated with other frameworks, but realistically they wont see the same love as the react integration. Most of the playground is a react app.

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Ok, interesting things… but no a better page for groups… for big communities I think is a good request…

Best regards

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