I have had a look around the forum and not found anything that really fits I don’t think. Im wanted to setup a forum again where users this time can do there own grow diary (private if they wish) and include what equipment they have etc?
Is there any plugin that suits this kinda think? Im not looking to blog although I will be setting up a wiki section. It’s for users to do so like an expanded user section where they can add photos etc, maybe outside of the forum and through their profile?
Maybe like a social profile and with sidebar to see who’s online etc?
I’ve had a look through some plugin and theme-component available here on Meta and found some that may be of interest to you.
As for an expandable user section, I found User Portfolio. That seems to be the closest thing that allows users too add pictures to their profile. However, a caveat is that this is publicly available for other users to click on. So may not be the best solution if users want to do something in private.
As for social media, users can add their social media sites on their profile so that they can share their work etc.
To achieve a blog post style topic there is this TC.
Finally, as for a who’s online there is a plugin available for that
Many thanks for your detailed reply. I did stumble across the User Portfolio and being private is not really 100% needed to be honest. From my research it seamed to be limited to photos only? Are others able to comment on the photos etc? I will take another look rather than spin up up another Discourse server. Maybe combining Wordpress SSO with Discourse is the way to go, I’m not sure?
Another approach for your use case would be to create a “grow-logs” category. It could be a place where people post updates about what they’re doing, what equipment they’re using, etc.
I’m interested in the diary idea because it could be solved in a similar way to what would be required to use Discourse as a publishing platform - for example, to use Discourse to create a small version of Substack, or to have a Discourse site that allows multiple people to publish their Obsidian Notes.
A possible solution would be to create a Discourse category and group for each publisher:
A benefit of this approach is that it allows you to control how users can interact with the category. In the example below, only members of the “simon” group (me), can create new topics in the category. Everyone else can see the category’s topics and reply to them.
Note that there are good reasons for not creating a group and category for every user on your site. In the past, having a huge number of categories on a Discourse site caused a performance issue. I think that’s been solved though. Having a huge number of groups and categories on a site will cause a UX issue, at least for site staff. Unless something has changed, hosted Discourse sites can only create a limited (but reasonable) number of categories.
That said, I think the category/group approach would be a good solution for sites with 10-20 separate publishers, diary creators, note takers, etc.
