So, share your Discourse developer adventure story in a reply here, and we’ll pick one person to send this nice little developer box to, absolutely free!
I would find a new machine really useful for dev work since I’m doing Discourse development on a borrowed laptop right now, so I’ll share my adventure story
I came to Discourse development around a year ago via being a member of a Discourse forum where we play the party game Mafia.
Discourse is really nice to use but understandably it’s not optimised for playing forum mafia! I mostly play on mobile, and one particular thing that was difficult on mobile (before the mobile usercard was a thing ) was filtering by a single user’s posts, which is a really common thing to do while playing. After bugging the site owner about it, I eventually ended up making a plugin myself to add a “filter by this user” button to the post menu.
From there I’ve become one of the main developers for the site, building features that make it easier for players to keep track of in game information and actions, to refer to specific posts (by making #number autolink to the post number in question), and to navigate across (via a crowdsourced modal in the header that reflected the content of a designated topic). We have a lot more planned and in the works, aiming to make playing Mafia on Discourse easier and more fun for our mostly-mobile playerbase. I hope that some of what we build will be helpful for other communities as well.
I’m not actually based in the US right now (I’ll be moving over next year), but I do have a US base in the form of someone there who will be visiting me soon or can otherwise get things to me if the only concern is shipping.
Developing a forum for LEGO fans seems easy enough… but it’s not always as straightforward as it seems. I’ve been working on development for a year now, trying to transfer punBB content and custom content to Discourse to modernize our site.
Let’s just say… there’s a lot to be done. I mean, the current forum was built in 2009, and the custom code from 2001! A crumbling tower needing to be upgraded fast. Obviously, Discourse was the best answer. Modern, fast, free.
As mentioned, a lot of our code is custom. We have a library of LEGO films that people have been submitting to for 10 years. I’m having to convert all this information to discourse-friendly data. Not an easy task! But I’m perservering because I know that my new forum will be far superior to anything in the past.
Yeah, I feel like Indiana Jones at times, going in to uncharted territory, finding dusty old code, running around obstacles, and giant boulders (I can’t figure out a good coding metaphor for giant boulders ), but throughout it all, I’m finding the treasure I seek. The finished product. The working code. A new forum for my members (that actually works on mobile!)
There’s still battles to come, as development continues, but I put on my fedora every time, and continue onward because in the end, the reward is worth it.
based Discourse developer.
) was filtering by a single user’s posts, which is a really common thing to do while playing. After bugging the site owner about it, I eventually ended up making a plugin myself to add a “filter by this user” button to the post menu.