I’m having second thoughts about these published pages.
Context: I have a ton of documentation that is in Google Docs. As part of the move of our community from Facebook to Discourse, we’re seizing the opportunity to move the documentation to Discourse too.
People loved that the documentation was public and “Word-like”, they’d print out the files for reference, bring copies to their vet, or send links by e-mail.
For me, the main advantage of the Page Publishing functionality is that it allows us to make public something that would otherwise have been private. But if, as will be the case for me, the documentation is already in a category that is going to be public, does it really make sense to also publish them?
The URLs are somewhat prettier. There is less “Discourse furniture” on the page, which is nice (but on the other hand, requires adding a footer or something to indicate it’s a community document… not a big deal).
But where I really am starting to see a problem is in the many links we have inside the documents that point to other documents (yay hypertext). If I use the “published page” URLs, community members who are reading the documentation get taken out of the community in a way and might not be able to find their way back. If we use the “Discourse topic” URLs, then outside readers are going to land on Discourse pages, complete with responses and (in my case at least, maybe I can change that?) a long list of new unread topics to peruse.
Here’s an example:
Who has been faced with a similar dilemma? How did you resolve it? Are there functionalities here that would help me but that I might not know about?
I don’t have answers; But the page publishing feature, while doing what it’s buit for, is deeply feature-lacking. I’m not convinced this is the way to go for your purpose
Indeed! You just elucidated the chief use-case of page publishing (making private content public) - and its chief limitation (links confusion and lack of navigation). Just use your public category, and style it a bit if needed. You might find Discourse Doc Categories useful for navigation.
I’m still a bit ambivalent. I do think that for certain documents, it would be better (if the person is not connected to discourse) for the sidebar and unread topics and other things to be absent. It looks more like a “document” like that. Would there be a way to display it like that to non-discourse-users, but to display it “with Discourse furniture” when logged in? With the same URL?
Would there be solutions to explore with WordPress (I haven’t at all yet looked into how they play together), but could a wordpress page be “mirrored” in Discourse as a topic, for example?
Heads up that I moved this to a new topic – I think it’s valuable.
I must be missing a nuance – why can’t you just make private topics public rather than using page publishing? You could use permalinks if the URL is that important. See how https://meta.discourse.org/recommendations redirects to https://meta.discourse.org/t/recommendations/302355.
Thanks for picking this up! This might be specific to the topic my community covers. In addition to the information they provide, we’ve realised that the fact our documents look like “real documents” and not like “web pages” helps us be taken seriously. Our members can print a document that looks like “a serious article” and show it to their vets –– this “secondary audience” of ours (which is in fact really important, even if they are not very active participants in our community itself) is likely, like most in the medical profession, to have strong negative biases regarding “stuff on the internet”.
So my concern is that having our documentation look like “something on an internet forum (omg)” will change the way it is perceived for members outside our community.
Do you see the problem?
Oh, thanks, didn’t know/forgot that was an option! I’ll definitely be using it.
I think that some ideas that could help me out of my current documentation conundrum would be:
have a document-category-specific layout within the theme (or, more generally, be able to pick a different look/layout for a specific category)
be able to display things differently in some categories for non-logged-in visitors (or even, by TL?)
be able to add some “discourse furniture” to Published Pages when viewed by a logged in user (but removed upon print of course)
Here’s a couple variations on an easy way to address this without Discourse “furniture”: provide an in-topic link to your documentation index page. (Users might not have always come from the index page – but at least they’ll get back to where they can navigate.)
Add an index link
If you’ll always link to the published pages (which do look much nicer for printing) then it may be this simple – just begin the content of each individual topic with a link back to your index page:
[Toute la documentation DF](https://entraide.diabete-felin.com/t/toute-la-documentation-df)
Que tu te sentes prêt·e à te lancer...
or
Add an index link that's hidden internally
If you’ll sometimes link to the published pages, but also sometimes link to the actual topics, you might want to hide the index link internally:
Add a wrap around a link to your FAQ/docs index:
[wrap=index-link]
[Toute la documentation DF](https://entraide.diabete-felin.com/t/toute-la-documentation-df)
[/wrap]
Que tu te sentes prêt·e à te lancer...
The [wrap] code allows this bit of custom CSS to hide that link when the regular topic itself is viewed:
Thanks, this looks helpful! We’ll certainly be linking to the topic pages in our discussions as the whole point of having them in Disocurse is to make it easy for people to refer to them
Hi, I’ve just tried this but these are really redirects, not permalinks, right? Or is there a way to make the “permanent link” the one that is displayed when the target is loaded?
Another issue I’m having is that the print version for the Published Page is not great as is (but I still need to work on the screen styles). Is this a Theme issue? If I want to improve the print CSS, where would I do that?
Yes, those are redirects (why weren’t they named as such from the beginning? ), and no, this is not possible to keep the same URL. Perhaps with a custom plugin…
From what I understand, crawler_layout.scss is specifically applied to crawler’s layout. Pages without crawler’s layout still load printer-friendly.scss when we open the print window.
For customizations, use the @media print { media query.
