I’m a debut sci-fi author and I’m going to have a very robust website (FF7.com) for discovery and discussion of my book.
I’m trying something new in that at the end of every chapter is a URL for readers to discuss it, each of the 40 chapters having its own URL and hopefully that will be a self-hosted Discourse thread. In the book it looks like this.
I’m lucky enough to own a very short domain name, FF7.com, from when I ran a fansite many years ago. Chapter-based discussions will be at FF7.com/01, FF7.com/02, etc up to 40. It would be great if each of these chapters-specific threads was also viewable from the main forum on my site. Perhaps in a “chapters” category.
I think Discourse is set up for this kind of thing.
I would rather not use redirects. The site is built in WordPress with Breakdance.
So, my question is, can self-hosted discourse do this? Anything I should do in particular to set this up? My web host is a good friend of mine and he’s very talented.
Discourse’s internal Permalinks can do this for you.
You’d designate a URL like 02 and set the permalink to point to whatever category or topic that ends up corresponding to. (It might be category 7, or topic 42, etc.)
Example: I have a topic https://forum.tasat.org/t/stories-about-blocking-out-the-sun/505
I could set a permalink for /sunblock that points to that topic:
Thank you! I have a long history with online community platforms and I think Discourse just looks, feels and acts just the way I would like it to. I am a veteran UX director for video games companies and for Enterprise, and your product just looks delicious.
Well, no – it’ll redirect to the real Discourse page. (I botched the link, it’s forum.tasat.org/sunblock and does actually work.)
I took “I would rather not use redirects” to mean manually setting up URL redirects in a system file. Discourse at least makes the permalinks dead simple.
You have a killer site, both the main site and the forum. And a fellow sci-fi author to boot!
I might end up doing that kind of forwarding mechanism, but I would really love it if the user could stay on FF7.com/01 because if they decide to share it with somebody else, it’s so short, clean and recognizable. Not the end of the world if I can’t, though. Maybe the answer is to embed the thread in a WordPress page? Can you do that? Thanks for your help.
Love the short links idea. Have you considered using QR codes instead? if this is a print book then QR codes can also be a quick way to get to the related topic on your Discourse.
Note that Discourse supports short links to topics, e.g. https://meta.discourse.org/t/-/01 would link to the welcome topic for this forum. ff7.com/t/-/01 might be a little too clunky for you. So a redirect really seems to be the way to go.
Another consideration is that Discourse prefers to be on a subdomain not at the TLD. It’s possible to do it at TLD but takes some extra hackery. Maybe you want to install a URL shortener on ff7.com - there are lots of open source options for that.
I don’t think I want to go with QR codes on the page because the reader will need their phone, that stops the flow of reading, and I don’t think I need them because the URL is so short anyway, you can memorize it.
The solutions you recommend would forward the user to the new URL, right? I’m really trying to avoid that. I want them to stay on FF7.com/01 and have the specific thread load there, but also be visible in the forum itself, which I probably will put at FF7.com/forum cuz I’m old school.
That will be hard! And more trouble I think than it is worth. If those short URLs are essential to you, You may be better off just using wordpress where you can have more control over URLs.
How many chapters will there be? Maybe you can do it just via the forum navigation. Send people to the forum ensure they can then click a big button to go to the chapter they want.
All this wonderful discussion has sharpened my question, so I searched “Can you embed Discourse into a WordPress page, and it looks like you can! WP Discourse – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
With that, I can just make a WordPress page at FF7.com/01 and embed a thread in it. I think that will work for my purposes.
You’ve already discovered the Discourse/WP plugin – I’ll just note that while the project page lists blog.discourse.org and BoingBoing.net as examples, BoingBoing has unfortunately moved to a monetized newsletter format – and IIRC they weren’t embedding replies anyway.
It looks like the plugin setup may be a bit challenging but it must be doable.
Whatever you decide, I look forward to seeing how your project goes!
