thanks for saying that!
I don’t think that’s quite right. The comparison between the two tools has limits, and I think they make a difference here: WordPress, as a blogging tool, is primarily designed for writing blog posts. Discourse, on the other hand, is designed to house a community. Community dynamics are much more complex than the writer-reader relationship of the blog.
Of course I open up my Discourse community to my members with the default settings, but the chances that they will stick around long enough for there to actually be a community there are slim, in all honesty. Whereas I can write blog post after blog post in my vanilla WordPress install, and I’ll have a perfectly fine blog to show people after some time, even if nobody visits it much.
Actually, that’s really not one of my headaches. Having “cat files” in a category is a perfectly workable option (an extension of what we do today with Google Sheets, one per cat).
My headaches are things like:
- not being able to play around with category structure and properties easily and “see” the result (“thinking out loud” with the tool – the visual interface mockup Canapin spun up would clearly be exactly the kind of thing needed for that)
- not being able to easily identify what controls certain aspects of the visual layout of topics, category listings, the navigation, the various widgets and buttons that are everywhere
- badges: there are too many of them, do I do away with them completely, or just some of them, which ones, what will be a good balance between “nudges of encouragement” and what might be perceived as “useless/confusing notifications”?
- notifications and alerts: in app, by e-mail… again, after less than 24h in a barely hatched Discourse instance, my moderator’s first comment this morning was on the number of e-mails she had in her inbox – I see the e-mail integration/notifications as an asset, but what will be the right balance so people don’t simply flee because they feel spammed?
- custom user fields not working as I expected: I added a handful of them, thinking I would refine later, but I didn’t manage to find where to fill in those added fields in my current profile, so that’s making me think that “refine later” is maybe a bad calculation (or maybe I didn’t manage to find those custom user fields on my profile, so how will our regular members find them?)
- member onboarding: on Facebook we do series of posts to “nudge” new members along the “learning journey” to take care of their cat. It’s a huge timesink, very cumbersome to do. I’m certain Discourse can automate that (I’ve already looked a bit). Maybe we do this by message rather than posts? What are the steps I need to take to get a decent “autoresponder-like” thing going on? How easy (or not, cf. categories) will it be to fiddle with the onboarding process once something is in place and people are in the Discourse community?
- user roles and permissions: on Facebook we have moderators and helpers, and the moderation team is structured in little teams with specific missions. Some triage new users and do welcome posts. Some do content moderation. Some manage the beginners group. Some coach the helpers. Some work on preparing member lists for our periodic onboarding posts. We’ve always felt limited by the very restrictive user roles on Facebook, and Discourse is going to allow us to do things differently. But how? Again, there is “design” (which roles and groups and permissions and who goes where) and “implementation in the system” (actually fiddling with groups, settings, member lists…). And how will our current organisation function or clash with built-in trust levels? Do the progression criteria make any kind of sense for our community?
- group documents: seems they will work as Published Pages, but I need to figure out how to style the title levels properly to match the existing documents somewhat. How do I manage the import/migration? Copy-paste by hand, or is there a way to automate this? I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know, in a way. Same with videos: I need to stick the 70 or so videos in Youtube, and then create topics for each of them: is it worth looking for an automated solution or do we do it by hand? No idea.
- …
- this kind of stuff
(and I’m not even getting started on AI integration, which is also one of the reasons I’m so excited about Discourse…)
Maybe the fact I’m migrating an already mature community also adds to the headache: it’s not at all the same thing as starting with a blank slate and having the opportunity to let community culture develop in symbiosis with the tool that houses it.