We’re bringing the GIF picker that’s currently available as a theme component directly into Discourse core. GIFs in Discourse are now served via Klipy. [1]
Bringing GIFs to Discourse core means easier setup, particularly for our hosted customers who can use the enable_gifs setting to activate GIFs in their community without further credentials. As part of core, GIFs will also now get first-class testing, updates, and support going forward. The end experience is unchanged from what you see today — GIF button in the composer toolbar and in chat, which opens a GIF search modal:
If you are already using the GIFs theme component…
Hosted customers will be automatically migrated to the new core feature over the coming weeks.
Self-hosted customers can run the following rake task to migrate your existing settings across to Klipy: rake themes:discourse_gifs:migrate. Please consult Klipy’s API documentation to get a key.
What about existing GIFs on older posts?
Existing GIFs are unaffected. GIFs already posted in older topics will continue to display as normal as they are sourced from the provider CDN. The change only affects new GIFs being added to posts.
Turning on Enable GIFs in your community
For now, this is considered an experimental change! We’re welcoming your feedback, which will help us make improvements and roll this out further.
If you are not using the theme component already, then you can turn this on by heading to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Enable GIFs item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:
The settings are mapped over from Giphy → Klipy automatically when the rake task is run, you won’t need an API key for this as it is set already on hosted sites.
But I have configured the disabled_image_download_domains setting to prevent the download of GIFs provided by Giphy. If you change the provider, this will suddenly break. I don’t think GIFs are important enough to be preserved. It’s not worth the space nor the edit indicators on posts.
I remember how annoying it was after switching from Tenor to Giphy, and I don’t expect that to be part of your migration.
Will your migration try include translation overrides done on the theme? I know you tried that with the welcome banner and the result on my forum were default texts for German users but texts migrated from the banner in English so I had to revert them manually. Do I need to check the texts after this migration too?
I will have a look into this, possibly the migration script can be extended to handle this automatically by appending the media urls for Klipy to the site setting if it is already enabled for another provider.
We will likely have several updates to the rake task in the next couple of weeks so I will check this too. At the moment the change is experimental and currently being tested on internal sites first.
It is fine to keep using the theme component for the next couple of weeks, but if the component is installed then you won’t see the upcoming change — this is intentional:
This is because you may have changed settings within the theme component and we want to map those settings across correctly to core. After updating Discourse to the latest version you could use the rake task as mentioned in the OP, though there is no urgency to update in this moment as you are self hosting.
We will be making further improvements to the migration script over the next 1-2 weeks.
Turning on Enable GIFs in your community
