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.
