Mentionables

The Mentionables plugin lets you establish a custom mention dataset. Custom mentions work the same as @users or #categories, but use data external to discourse, including linking to external urls.

Composer & Final Post view

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This is just perfect for sets of Affiliate links. You can use Amazon or any other provider for that matter.

Administration View

Example Source

Currently google sheets is the only supported data source, however the plugin is designed to support any source. If you’d like to add a new source, please contact us.

:desktop_computer: Get the code

:page_facing_up: Read the documentation

:bug: Report a bug

Not sure how to install a plugin? Follow the steps here.

25 Likes

Can topics be filtered by mentionables? I was thinking of creating a US state dataset, so each post can be related to a state.

Not currently. How are you thinking the filter would work in an abstract sense? You can estabilsh any external dataset as a mentionables set. Perhaps you can use an additional column in the data that informs how posts with custom mentionable data would be ordered. Then you’d also need to deal with situations where mutiple mentions were made in the same post. If you scoped out the feature in some detail in an abstract sense we could get a sense of how much it would take to implement it.

Originally name was optional and could be derived from og tags - this was lost during a refactor.

I’ve pushed a fix: make name optional again · paviliondev/discourse-mentionables@a7007b2 (github.com)

1 Like

OK I’ve completed a couple of PR’s for this which get things back up and running:

Moves the API to Google’s official API, dropping an intermediary gem (and a few others) and adding CI so things should be a bit more reliable going forward.

Please note the breaking changes to settings:

  • mentionables_google_spreadsheet_url: “URL of the Google spreadsheet”

becomes:

  • mentionables_google_spreadsheet_id: “ID of the Google spreadsheet”

  • mentionables_google_worksheet_gids: “Restrict Google spreadsheet import to worksheet GIDs. If empty, all worksheets will be imported.”

becomes:

  • mentionables_google_worksheet_names: “Names of in-scope source worksheets (tabs)”

And there is a new setting:

  • mentionables_google_worksheet_max_row: “Maximum number of rows scanned”

This fixes the front end (whilst adding tests)

3 Likes

Seems like a dead end…

Thank you for reporting that, I have updated the link.

2 Likes

Why is this so technically? Im not even able to set it up and work.

If there were a upload button for the spreadsheet it would have been available for an avg user user like me.

Or a online form editor. This is, sadly, way too advance.

I partly agree with you. This plugin was indeed built for a pretty technical audience. But only the setup is quite hard, after that, the opposite.

In fact, it tries to use a familiar editor by leveraging the power of Google Sheets.

Once it has been setup, any non-technical person can use the plugin in a much easier way than having to upload a file.

It’s not suitable for @frold’s use case I suspect which is to present a financial graph rendered by a third party site. Mentionables is not intended for such a use case.

if someone would guide via the chat they are welcome to contact me.

I dont think its safe to share the codes via the public forum…

@frold there’s no code here for sharing third party graphs. This plugin is not going to help you. It’s purely designed to permit sites to allow users to search and recall from a list of products as grey bubbles that are links to each products page.

1 Like

Okay - I thought it would insert a link into the post.

This url could be to an image, I thought

it does.

No, it’s just a boring description in a grey bubble :sweat_smile:

A single additional screenshot would be helpful here I guess :slight_smile:

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This is just perfect for sets of Affiliate links.

Updated the OP.

2 Likes

Before I go through the setup and config – would an appropriate use-case for mentionables be in writing of Topics which are drafts of legal documents which need to be able to include references to laws and cases, where the connected “mentionables” spreadsheet contains a collection of relevant legal references and case law?

1 Like

That’s sounds like a strong possibility. If you have nice pictures of dusty old books that would help :wink:

1 Like

One day I’ve been meaning to add alternative snippets for the same item accessed by pressing + additional times.

OK here are my settings (I’m using the Test Data Google Sheet provided in the setup instructions), and the error I am getting… (apparently the plugin is broken, and the developer requires a fee? Which is fine, of course, just FYI!)

Any help would be much appreciated!

It’s still working, make sure your private key starts: -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY---- and ends -----END PRIVATE KEY-----

1 Like

No, it’s working - and free. Why did you think that?

1 Like