Microcommunities / clubs

Hello,

I am wondering if discourse has considered supporting microcommunities?

In my case, I have a community of amateur radio operators who may be parts of local ham radio clubs.

I would love to have a way for local clubs to have their own group page to display:

  • Latest activity
  • Discuss Club topics
  • Club chat (with new discourse chat!)
  • See other club members profiles

I feel like the bones / structure of this are here within discourse.

I think a quick way to get there would be to enhance the Groups page to allow you display Categories for that group.

I would also need to create a Group type called “Clubs” to differentiate this type of group from others.

This type of club / micro community functionality is something Invision Communtiy has built out - I think Discourse can do it better!

As another option, I an considering building a club directory and an event directory in Wordpress, and having the main club page on Wordpress. It would just be easier if it was all inside Discourse because it would require less dev work. But perhaps having the club page inside Wordpress is actually the best approach?

I’m curious to hear other thoughts on this!

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Looks rather like what NaNoWriMo do for local groups where there are similar posts of interest (mostly) to users from those areas. Not being an admin there but merely a user I have not details on how it can be achieved only that it can be.

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@merefield thanks for sharing this!

I’m not sure this is a good option for me, because in mu community, the users local club won’t be their primary group - their primary group would be their membership level with the global organization.

It is still relevant, I would love to dynamically show homepage content - I’ll look into this further!

My original thought was that this would be best achieved by customization of the group page.

Additionally I do not have the ability to install plugins.

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@pfaffman’s TC is more flexible and not wedded to Primary Groups. My plugin just exists because it doesn’t require much configuration.

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They are just standard categories, nothing special about them beyond being restricted to trust_level_0 in the permissions. As the person who created most of them I am painfully aware of the setup. :slight_smile:

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I wish there was a laugh reaction for that response :sweat_smile:

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There are over 700 of them and the about topics in many get updated each year, need I say more? :slight_smile:

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@merefield do you know if it is possible to create a custom group type? That would allow me to identify “Club” as a type of group and treat it differently from my primary member groups :slight_smile:

You could do this with a Group Custom Field, see Custom Fields for Groups? or add a column to the model? Either is going to require a plugin …

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Another potential hack may be to establish a naming convention that uses a common prefix for a given group “type”, like @x-foo and @x-bar.

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