So far we have found Discourse to be extremely customisable … so can someone tell me if there is an existing plugin or any other way via settings or so to allow staff to define a set number of “stages” or “maturity levels” to any topic?
The concept behind the “stages” is that as each topic “matures” there’s an off-line process where decisions are made to provide different levels of support allowing contributors to keep working on a “topic”. So we would like to mark certain topics with a maturity level status (in our case we have 6 stages Stage 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and n). A default status e.g. 0 for new topics would be nice too.
Anyone can see the “stage” of any topic and searching and filtering on specific “stages” should be available to anyone. Ideally only “staff” should be able to change the “stage”.
Ideas?
EDIT:
Looking at the ratings plugin code it looks like “rating” could be replaced with “staging” and “rate” with “stage” and there is no need to calculate averages or top. I am not sure how this custom field thing works yet.
That (tags) is indeed what we are using now to mark the stage any topic is at … I was just wondering whether someone else had needed/built something like this before.
It looks like the “ratings” or “voting” plugins also added a feature on topic level, so it is possible but I have not explored how one would do it.
Those plugins are open source so you can see how they work. If you’ve got a budget you can post in marketplace. (but I still don’t understand what tags aren’t doing)
Tags do work @pfaffman , but it does mix the purpose/feature of setting a topic to a specific stage with other tags to classify topics. Would also be nice to be able to select from a pre-set list of (only) stages and distinctively style the “stage” aspect of a topic.
Anyhow, we are still in a pilot testing phase and as I said, so far Discourse has been incredibly easy to customise and this is actually the first aspect where we could envision a “nicer” approach.
Out of curiosity even though I realise it’s probably like asking how long a piece of string is, but what would be a ball park cost to have someone write a custom plugin like this?
