mcwumbly announced a new biweekly community hangout to discuss Discourse features and community building live via Zoom. The initial session on October 22, 2026, covered meta community design, while the upcoming November 5 session will focus on “Splitting the bundle for faster load times.” Community members expressed enthusiasm for the event format, with putty praising the integration of chat and livestream features.
Key discussions included the logistics of the events. philh asked about recordings, to which mcwumbly responded that they are not currently planned but might be explored in the future. nathank suggested varying the time to accommodate different time zones and using the Discourse Live plugin instead of Zoom. mcwumbly clarified that Zoom is used for its mature moderation controls, but noted that long-term convergence between Events and Live features is a goal. Following feedback, mcwumbly proposed a later time slot for the November 19 session to better serve global participants.
The team also outlined potential topics for future hangouts, including custom themes, personalized feeds, and Docs improvements. A significant portion of the discussion centered on the introduction of built-in Blog features. When philh questioned the need for these features, citing concerns about “feature bloat” similar to vBulletin, mcwumbly explained the strategic shift. He detailed how Discourse has moved many plugins into core, allowing features to be toggled on or off, thereby managing bloat while offering deeper integration for users who prefer it over external solutions. This approach aims to meet users where they are, whether they want a standalone blog or a community-integrated one.
Vsekraski, writing in Russian, supported the blog feature for their community of finishing experts. mcwumbly translated and engaged with this, noting that while initial designs focus on team-maintained blogs, wider user adoption is under consideration. The thread highlights the team’s willingness to iterate on product direction based on community feedback and the evolving nature of Discourse’s feature set.
Every other week, we’ll make space to get together live for some informal discussion.
Come hang out with some of the Discourse team, take a closer look at some new and upcoming Discourse features, and chat about current topics related to the product or community building.
At least a few members of the Discourse team will be there, and often we’ll start with a short demo of something we’re working on.
Upcoming
2026-11-05T14:00:00Z: Splitting the bundle for faster load times @david will walk through some of the work we’ve been doing to make Discourse load faster, even as we add more features to the product, by splitting the JavaScript application into bundles that aren’t loaded until they are needed, followed by open discussion about this topic or anything else on people’s minds.
Past
2026-10-22T13:00:00Z: Meta community design @manuel will give us a quick tour of the recent updates we have been making to the design of meta, and a behind the scenes look at how the pieces are put together.
Can’t make this first one, but love the spirit of this!
PS: events functionality is looking great with the addition of integrated chat channels & livestream Join Zoom button! We’re considering moving our events to Streamyard, and this UX is compelling!
look forward to you joining another one in the future!
hopefully this (and other events we do here) will give us all more collective experience together with the events features of Discourse as well, and drive further improvements there too.
We aren’t planning on recording these, but we may explore doing it at different times in future sessions. If there are other time windows that you think we should consider in the future, let us know!
Thanks for the reply, no worries on time, there is no perfect time. Too bad about not recording. Perhaps that will change depending on how the Zooms go.
Yes, we’ll certainly consider it in the future. But want to get a few more of them under our belt first.
Both of these features are pretty new. For now, we’ll continue to use Zoom as the backed for the streaming for these Events. Longer term, I think we’ll aim for more convergence between Events and Live, and the distinction will probably seem less important.
I am thinking about what kinds of things we might chat about this coming week (2026-11-05T14:00:00Z)
A few possibilities I have in mind at the moment:
walk through of how we build custom themes
a look at a new “personalized feed” prototype
recent and upcoming improvements to Events features
a look at upcoming changes to Docs
a look at upcoming built-in Blog features
More ideas welcome!
We will likely only have time to really dig in to one of them, but it’ll be good to start collecting things here that people might want to touch on in the future as well.
Thanks for the info, it does seem to be an undertaking that deserves exposure and one that a number of folks will like.
For me reviewing the README I get some flashbacks to the feature bloating of vBulletin and others.
5. Configure:
discourse_blog_url: e.g. https://blog.example.com, no trailing slash/path.
discourse_blog_category: the single public category.
discourse_blog_drafts_category: the private editorial category.
discourse_blog_title, discourse_blog_description, discourse_blog_about.
discourse_blog_enabled: enable after configuration.
The notion of moving Discourse into the blogosphere is not appealing to me but I certainly see how others would like the move.
You mention embedding and by inference the challenges to a successful integration… for me a better integration with common platforms is a better long term solution.
Discourse has a long history of including ancillary features in the product, particularly as plugins.
For a long time, that core vs. plugin boundary was the way that we defined the boundary and kept bloat at bay.
In the past couple years, we have integrated many plugins into core, blurring that boundary. But it still exists. Core plugins can be easily toggled on or off, allowing sites to control which of these feature sets to include.
That has laid the foundation for including more features within Discourse in this way.
It is not exclusive with integrating with other independent solutions. Many have their preferred solutions for these adjacent problems, and we support that too. But where people don’t have those preferences, or where they prefer something even more deeply integrated, we’re more prepared to offer that now.
So I think you’re right to point out this is a bit of a change in direction, or perhaps an acceleration in the direction we were already headed.
There are risks to this approach, but we are being very intentional about it, for example, by continuing to define a plugin boundary with toggles. Another risk is dividing our attention as a small team.
But we think we are in a different world now, where we can include more of these features at a level of quality we can be proud of and people will appreciate.
Too bad about not recording. Perhaps that will change depending on how the Zooms go.