Currently the Embedding feature allows to define multiple hosts, but only only one RSS feed and one username to import posts.
The feature requested would allow to define RSS feed and username per host, adding them to the existing table.
For what is worth, I had posted a similar feature request without gathering enough interest: Embedding: one RSS feed for each host. This is why I am willing to pay for this feature now.
When do you need it done?
Sooner better than later, but it is not urgent.
What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
Not knowing the amount of work involved, I cannot assess. A fair price.
Why not create another host with the same domain but a different RSS feed. Does that not work? There’s also the option for Key to pull discourse username from feed. That may be helpful if you can alter the feed itself to include the username.
That said, I don’t see a plugin-outlet on the embedding page or a widget, which means there’s not necessarily an easy way to tie into that section without monkey-patching. And that’s something that is sometimes necessary but rarely recommended and far from ideal. I would try to find a different way to do what you want.
Maybe try an RSS importer and then embed on your site using the existing topic method (see Embedding Discourse Comments via Javascript and scroll down to “Linking to existing topics”).
We want to provide a “discussions plugin” like Disqus or Facebook do, but on a small scale targeting sites that share our principles. Users brought to our Discourse by one site would then get to know the other sites, and the idea is to create a critical mass of active participants in times where most of these blogs must rely on Facebook, Twitter etc to get feedback.
In https://la.confederac.io/c/publicaciones you can see what we have got currently, a combination of blogs, each one run by different 3rd parties, some connecting with JavaScript embedding and some with WP-Discourse. We are working to bring more blogs.
Each blog has its own category and its own user to create topics. With the WP-Plugin this can be achieved. However, with JS embedding it is possible to define only one user for all of the allowed hosts, not one user per host. This means that we need to user a generic user and then change owner of the topics created manually.
Our assumption is, since we need to touch the database, the UI and something more to allow one user per host, on the same go we could solve the similar problem of having only one RSS feed available for embedding. RSS is much reliable than scrapping the HTML source code (I believe it also could avoid the problem of topics created when users visit old pages, but that might be wrong and is secondary anyway).
@joebuhlig, as far as I can see, your recommendations doesn’t apply to our use case, because we have many external sites generating topics in different categories and with different usernames.
Let’s assume that no, that it should be a plugin. What would be your plan to implement this feature? (hopefully in a way that would leave a door open to the possibility of integrating this functionality in the future)
And I still welcome offers. I wonder what the problem is. Too complex task? Too boring?
Meanwhile, we spend every day some quite boring minutes changing author of entries. Since this functionality is not available as a bulk action (which is understandable) we must do the changes manually one by one.
One workaround that I can think of is to somehow create a RSS feed of RSS feeds, together with the help of the option key to pull discourse username from feed. This moves the complexity away from Discourse.
Otherwise, I could help with a plugin that supports multiple feeds and users. Will PM you
Thank you to the developers who have responded to this offer. @xrav3nz has been a very helpful volunteer in previous questions and requests we had, and we are working together on this project now.
The problem is that we want the different feeds creating topics in their own categories. Otherwise this workaround could have been enough indeed.
Importing RSS feeds from different sources and into different categories works very well! You can define the frequency, and in theory you can add dozens of feeds without hogging your server.
The only point pending is assigning the topics created to the right user. In fact, this seems to be a problem in Discourse and not in this plugin. The topics created via RSS poll are assigned to the correct username. However, it happens often that topics will be created first by the regular JS Embed workflow, scrapping the HTML content and assigning the topics to the default username.
This plugin updates the content of these newly created topics as soon as the RSS process pulls them for the first time. Content rendered through RSS feed is much more reliable than HTML scrapping, so the automatic re-rendering is very convenient. The plugin should be able to reassign these topics to the right username, but (if I understood this well) it cannot because of a bug in Discourse.
@xrav3nz has submitted a patch that should fix this problem:
We will report back if/when this problem is solved.
If you are looking for this multiple RSS feeds feature and you don’t mind (much) about different usernames applied to different RSS feeds, this plugin is ready for your use.
I wonder what the problem is. Too complex task? Too boring?