Following Show and tell: where to share things interesting things you're doing with Discourse, here’s a topic where I will regroup the various custom improvements I made or features I added to my forums, and why.
Community-funded Discourse features
One of my forums is community-funded. The community is very helpful, and the donation goal (~300€) has always been reached, even if it has been slower each year, up to 6 months to reach the goal.
The original setup
- A donation topic with a link in the header:
- The topic is updated yearly and pinned until the donation goal is reached.
There was no real problem, but the donations happening over a course of many months took a bit of my time and energy to manage.
What I did and what changed
- With the help of @Arkshine, I added a donation progress bar on the forum:
- The progress bar is updated automatically for each donation with a custom script that uses Ko-Fi’s API.
Outcome
I didn’t really expect major changes, but to my surprise, in the first year this progress bar was added, the time to reach the donations goal was decreased from 6 months to 2 days!
It made me more at ease managing those donations. I never wanted to shove a “donate!” in members’ faces, and I think this donation bar isn’t invasive or pushy. It’s just a great visual cue and reminder.
For those interested in community-funding, you can have a look at Discourse Ko-fi integration, which has a compatibility setting with the progress bar component.
Features for image-centric communities
To my taste, Discourse has long lagged in media display and discovery. Everyone shares and watches pictures and videos these days, and Discourse doesn’t value them enough (kudos to the team for improving the image viewer recently, though!).
Image search improvement
Notably, I think the search deeply misses a feature: returning actual pictures when using the with:images filter. As search currently works, it only returns post excerpts, which makes image search frustrating and ineffective.
After a few years, I made a plugin adding this feature: Search Thumbnails
Since I’ve installed this plugin on my main forum, it’s truly difficult to go back to the original “imageless” Discourse image search. I hope a similar feature will be added officially one day.
Topic galleries
My main forum isn’t particularly image-focused, but users post a lot of pictures in certain topics. The most obvious example is Pictures of your latest ride continued - General - Unicyclist.com.
Several years prior, I spent many evenings browsing this topic, post after post, looking at pictures when the site was still using vBulletin.
To improve the experience of people looking for pictures, I’ve made a plugin that creates galleries from any topic.
While there’s still room for improvement, it works very well for what it’s made for.
Automatic bookmarks for movies and TV shows
I have a personal Discourse in which I post many things. Among those things are movies and shows I want to watch. Since I don’t use applications to track release dates, I first made a custom script to help automate bookmarks reminders, then, later, a Discourse plugin which works as follows:
In the composer, when I paste a TMDB movie or show link in the title field, the plugin uses TMDB’s API to return the data (poster, actors and actresses, overview, and most importantly, release dates) and fill in the title and content, as well as adding proper tags (movie or show).
After the topic is created, a bookmark is automatically created with a reminder at the time of first VOD or physical release.
I probably forgot things worth sharing, and I’ll add those here later. 