Landing Pages Blog đŸ›©

Plugin Extras
1

Working, but no longer maintained [July 2022]

You can now use the Landing Pages Plugin to run a blog with Discourse :tada:. Set a category to be your blog, and the first post of every topic in that category will have its own blog page, and appear on a blog post list page.

Screen Shot 2021-05-13 at 5.04.18 PM

This project has been a joint effort between @meghna and myself. All of the nice design work is hers. If you like the design of this blog make sure to check our her Discourse Themes. Any bugs you find in the functionality are mine :slight_smile:

Get the code

GitHub-Mark-64px Landing Pages Plugin
GitHub-Mark-64px Blog Landing Pages
GitHub-Mark-64px Blog Landing Theme

See it in action

try.thepavilion.io/blog

Please note that all content on the blog and displayed in screenshots in this post is from The Conversation, and used under the Creative Commons License used by that site. All content belongs to its original authors and is used for demonstration purposes only.

How to set it up

Follow these steps in order

  1. Install the Landing Pages Plugin (how to install a plugin in Discourse).
  2. Install the Blog Landing Theme, (how to install a theme in Discourse).
  3. Set up the Blog Landing Pages as your landing pages repository.
  4. In the Landing Pages Administration UI change the category of the “Blog” page to whatever category you want to use to run your blog.
    Screenshot at May 13 17-30-49
    Screenshot at May 13 17-30-49897×633 131 KB

That’s it! The first post of every topic in that category will now be posts on your blog :slight_smile:

Restrict posting to contributors

You’ll probably want to restrict posting in that category to a group of blog contributors. If you’re not sure how to do that, here’s a quick guide

  1. Create a user group, e.g. “Contributors”, by going to /groups and clicking “New Group”
  2. Add users to the group (“Add Members” in the top right)
  3. In the blog category “Security” settings remove the “Create” permission from “Everyone”, and add your Contributors group
    Screen Shot 2021-05-13 at 5.34.51 PM
    Screen Shot 2021-05-13 at 5.34.51 PM942×326 14.4 KB

Now only your contributors can post on your blog, but everyone can comment on posts.

What makes this different from other blog solutions?

There’s some great existing solutions to running a blog inside or alongside Discourse, including

This is a bit different as it’s an entirely seperate set of pages that are not part of the Discourse client app, but it still uses the same server. This gives you a few advantages over running a seperate blog (e.g. on Wordpress), or using a Discourse category directly (e.g. with a theme component), including

  • You can create content and let users reply in Discourse, but have a dedicated blog environment for reading and sharing. Readers of your blog will feel like they’re reading a blog instead of a forum post.
  • You have a single user account system (Discourse’s)
  • You can use Discourse groups to restrict access to the blog
  • You can make Discourse posts appear as comments on your blog with no additional setup
  • You get nice responsive blog theme out of the box
  • You only have to set up, and pay for, one server
  • The blog doesn’t need to load your forum to work, so it can load quickly
  • You can easily keep your blog pages (and theme) in version control
  • You get a nicely formatted New Blog Post notification email (see below)
  • You can easily manage it alongside any other landing pages you need using the Landing Pages Plugin.

However, while the Blog Landing Pages have some clear advantages, they aren’t going to be the best community blog solution for everyone. You should test out the different solutions and see which one works for you.

What does it mean to “Subscribe” to the blog?

If you’re logged in and click the “Subscribe” button you’ll see a modal (if you’re logged out you’ll be redirected to Discourse login)

Screen Shot 2021-05-13 at 5.40.28 PM
Screen Shot 2021-05-13 at 5.40.28 PM890×350 19.3 KB

If you’ve checked the box next to “Subscribe to [site name]'s posts” and submitted the form, you’ll automatically be set to “Watching First Post” for the blog category. That means you’ll get an email notification every time there’s a new post in that category, like you would if you were subscribed to a blog!

You can also set your notifications for the blog category to “Watching First Post” in the normal way (in Discourse) and that will have the same effect. “Watching” the category (were you get an email for every post, including replies), also counts as being subscribed.

The email notifications for a blog category are a bit special. Firstly, unless you made the post yourself, you’ll always get an email notification if you’re subscribed, even if you visited the site recently. Secondly, they’re designed to look like a blog post email

Screen Shot 2021-05-13 at 5.59.59 PM
Screen Shot 2021-05-13 at 5.59.59 PM1478×1042 151 KB

We plan to allow a site admin to edit the blog post email html in the Landing Pages Administration UI in the near future. Note that if you’re “Watching” the blog category, only the email notification for the first post in each topic will be different. Notifications for replies will look like normal Discourse notifications.

Beyond blogging

You can use the functionality described above to create a set of landing pages for any content, like how Wordpress is a blogging engine that you can use for displaying other (non-blog) types of content. You could use a category to manage a set of products, places or people, and automatically get both a landing page and a discussion topic for the content, just by making a single post in Discourse.

Any developer who knows a bit of Ruby on Rails could achieve any of those additional use cases using this system. You don’t need to know how Discourse works. As these blog pages are part of the landing pages plugin, you also get access to all the existing templates in that plugin, including contact forms, header, footer, topic lists and user profiles. You can read more about these templates, and others, in the plugin documentation.

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2

Looks great, good job! Is the Blog Landing Theme a requirement? Would it be possibel in that case to have it as a component (since those who already have another/customized theme might want to stick with it)?

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3

The Blog Landing Pages, and the functionality in the Landing Pages Plugin they rely on, are both designed to work with any theme :slight_smile: You can customise this however you like.

It doesn’t need to be active on your Discourse site to work, it just needs to be installed, then selected in the relevant page in the Landing Pages Admin UI. This is what the theme settings look like on try.thepavilion.io (you can see the page settings in the OP)

Screenshot at May 15 09-29-37
Screenshot at May 15 09-29-37759×367 150 KB

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Epic! Excited to try this out. Thanks for this :slight_smile:

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:exploding_head:

This is really cool. Got me rethinking my entire approach. Thanks! :laughing:

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6

This is great!

For customizing, should I fork the repo to input my site’s info? Or is there a better way to do that?

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Thanks @sethm, yes the Blog Landing Theme and Blog Landing Pages are intended as templates, so you could:

  • import them directly into your instance as described above;
  • fork them; or
  • download them and modify them like you would with a template for Wordpress, Ghost etc.
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Is there any way to have a subset of discourse content publicly viewable (like this blog content) rather than requiring registration / login? Thanks.

–Peter

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Hey Peter, yes, by default content in Discourse is publicly viewable. If it’s not, it means you have login required site setting enabled. You can then control the visibility of specific categories using category-specific permissions (in the category settings). You can see a screenshot of category-specific access settings above.

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Thanks, but I don’t see the screenshot for category-specific access settings?

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11

Any help?
Perhaps the category-specific settings don’t appear unless I remove login required?
But I don’t want to remove that until I have the categories set to public or login required

Thanks.

–Peter

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You should be able to view the category permissions from the Security tab in the admin wrench on the category page:

admin category wrench
admin category wrench1080×860 92.3 KB

category security tab
category security tab1080×1465 126 KB

Hope that helps. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Ah! Thanks.
So setting all categories and current users to say trust level 2, and the new category that I want to be public to trust level 0, and changing login required, should do the trick? Or is that logic wrong?

–Peter

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If you want the blog category to be visible to anonymous people as well as account-holders then you’d want the Everyone group as at least ‘See’.

And then set the other categories to be at least trust_level_0 so people would need to have an account to view and interact with the topics in those.

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Thanks that worked. Appreciate the help

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I need a bit help in understanding this plugin. On the one hand you tell that you can

Set a category to be your blog, and the first post of every topic in that category will have its own blog page, and appear on a blog post list page.

and on the other hand

  1. Set up the Blog Landing Pages as your landing pages repository.

Im confused. Can I run a blog off my Discourse posts without a git repository and any *html.erb files?

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The content of the blog is pulled from discourse posts. The layout of the blog is handled by the html files, which could be in the Blog Landing Pages repository.

This plugin is not like Hugo where you make blog posts in markup. Although integrating this with Hugo would be cool, we could attempt that at some point (cc @jumagura)

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18

I’ve been running a forum with Discourse for a couple of months so I’m still pretty new to it. I’ve installed a plugin before but when I tried installing the Landing Pages Plugin tonight I got an error when the app is rebuilt and it wouldn’t boot. Perhaps there’s a compatibility or version issue with something but I’m not sure where to start. Can anyone give me a pointer? I’ve looked back through the log but I can’t tell what the problem might be.

This is the last part of the results from running the rebuild:

Pups::ExecError: cd /var/www/discourse && su discourse -c 'bundle exec rake db:migrate' failed with return #<Process::Status: pid 364 exit 1>
Location of failure: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/gems/pups-1.1.1/lib/pups/exec_command.rb:117:in `spawn'
exec failed with the params {"cd"=>"$home", "hook"=>"db_migrate", "cmd"=>["su discourse -c 'bundle exec rake db:migrate'"]}
bootstrap failed with exit code 1
** FAILED TO BOOTSTRAP ** please scroll up and look for earlier error messages, there may be more than one.
./discourse-doctor may help diagnose the problem.
fb680c9c3b46dcd068abe877ed4187c730351c10139cc3eda2a8b7202822bf07
saul@discourseonubuntu2004-s-1vcpu-2gb-intel-lon1-01:/var/discourse$ 
saul@discourseonubuntu2004-s-1vcpu-2gb-intel-lon1-01:/var/discourse$

Thanks for any help.

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19

Can someone please check this plugin. I have the same issue like the guy above me. I get some errors while trying to build it, apparently it is broken since 2.9.0 beta 4 and higher.

I could provide some logs but it would be better if the creator checks a fresh discourse installation and then try to build it, because I tested this on an existing discourse installation as well as a fresh one, it always fails to build.

I followed exactly the provided steps in the initial post.

  1. Install the Landing Pages Plugin (how to install a plugin in Discourse) .
  2. Install the Blog Landing Theme , (how to install a theme in Discourse) .
  3. Set up the Blog Landing Pages as your landing pages repository .
  4. In the Landing Pages Administration UI change the category of the “Blog” page to whatever category you want to use to run your blog.
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20

I’ll update this plugin to be compatible with the latest Discourse in the coming week

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