Migrating from FB Groups to Discourse - help with features/functions

[nefv]

Hi there,

I volunteer to organise a community of c. 250 people belonging to an organisation that supports startups and new businesses.

Currently we use a facebook group as our online hub to post personal/professional updates, share resources, ask questions etc. As the community grows (we add people each year), it is becoming harder to keep up with discussions and given the recent publicity around facebook’s culture and operating practices, now seems like a good time to convince everyone to step away to a purpose-built platform to serve as the community’s online hub.

Discourse has 2 great things going for it:

1. Works over email (people can reply to topics and get digests right from their inbox)
2. It is open source, does not control user data and has a growing community.

However, I am going to have a tough job convincing people to move over without being able to replicate some of the key elements of the facebook experience and the ease of navigation.

The closest thing to this I have found so far is the Fakebook theme but I want to know if it is feasible with a small development budget to achieve the following:

1. Have a “Write post” box at the top of the page for logged in users
2. Rather than displaying just the topic title, show the title as well as the first 100 (or X) characters of each topic in the home view.
3. Customise side bar widets/boxes to be able to show a category feed, fixed text boxes and a feed of all media (photos, videos) recently posted.
4. Change the CSS and colours for the fakebook theme.

We are currently on the Discourse-hosted plan on a 14 day trial.

Realistically which of the 4 requirements above are achievable without mass code rewriting/customisation?

Thank you.

[Lure (Luka Renko)]

@nefv

• Have a “Write post” box at the top of the page for logged in users

Easy to do with this theme component:

(+ New topic) button in the header on all pages

A simple theme component to add the + New Topic button to the header. The button will show on every page - even inside topics. Screenshots: Desktop: [Capture] Mobile: [Capture2] Settings: This component has settings where you can choose the button icon, button text, button title, and whether or not to hide the default “New topic” button. You can also customize the text for when the button is disabled (if someone doesn’t have permission to post in a certain category or tag) [image] …

@nefv

• Rather than displaying just the topic title, show the title as well as the first 100 (or X) characters of each topic in the home view.

You could use Topic List Previews with excerpts - I use it on my forum

Topic List Previews (legacy)

This is now a Theme Component, the plugin is deprecated The new Topic is Topic List Previews Theme Component - theme - Discourse Meta [GitHub-Mark-32px] Repository: get the code here See further here: Pavilion [sandbox] Examples: check out the list further down. Request a feature Report a bug Donate: we are reviewing our donations system. Please check back later :). Maintainers: @merefield Overview Topic List Previews allows you to…

@nefv

• Customise side bar widets/boxes to be able to show a category feed, fixed text boxes and a feed of all media (photos, videos) recently posted.

This one is more tricky and something that you would probably need to engage a developer - you can find experienced plugin developers on marketplace

@nefv

• Change the CSS and colours for the fakebook theme.

Should be easy to do for somebody that is good in CSS.

[nefv]

Thanks for the quick reply Luka. I will give that plug in a whirl. Can it be installed on the “Try Discourse” platform?

The new topic theme button mod is good but not what I am after exactly. I want a text box in which you can write your post directly, like on a fb group. This is an example:

As for changing the colours, it would not let me do this when I tried it because it was a custom theme. On the admin page for this it says: Not editable, owned by: [Fakebook]