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?