After reading this post, i think it could be one better and be the CMS
Already having a fair few opinions of my own i am compelled to write a short ramble.
The recent surge in platforms like X and Reddit and the decline in certain blogs/news sites, I think Discourse is missing out on a massive market. Lets be honest the backend functionality is there but frontend is lacking in features. Imagine Discourse as the actual blog/news site with some fancy CSS and features. Think “Homepage features” and “Topic List Thumbnails” Components.
It’s more than just a comments platform or forum and I think there is scope, however.
Things I think are missing…
Discourse Marketplace - A dedicated website, a paid marketplace for themes and plugins, e.g charging £70 a year for a decent theme is reasonable and will bring in outside devs with new ideas. I mean look at some of the shite coded themes on Envato that are getting 250k sales and generating Millions.
Uses Page - Having a landing page for “Discourse Uses” with certain looking themes and plugins “not just a forum” would get peoples attention. Imagine discourse as a reviews platform, deals platform (swapd) Live football news (Kick Off) etc etc
Discourse Self-Hosting - Alongside the current packages have “self-managed” but are setup instantly with no docker install etc (you do this on hosted so surely this can be achieved) , similar to Digital Ocean but 1 click installs. Surely you lose a lot of customers and money due to this.
I am not very good at putting words down but hope you get the general gist.
Interesting ideas… it would seem possible for Discourse to be available preconfigured with certain plugins and theme elements to suit some particular use cases like a news site.
Re. point 3, the self-managed instant install: based on my own experience, the gumption and ability to work through the installation and setup process feels like a minimal prerequisite to self-management. If Discourse hosted unsupported 1-click installs, I imagine sites running out of storage, log files accumulating, upgrades failing, etc. – and unhappy users who weren’t prepared for the responsibilities facing a crashed site vs., I don’t know, an ala carte support menu? I see some staffing challenges and PR pitfalls with that scenario.
I appreciate the open-source nature of Discourse and enjoy self-hosting a small forum, but if I were an organization with a lot at stake and little in-house talent, the cost of fully managed hosting might seem a small price to pay.
In my view, the greatest advantage of Discourse lies in its complete openness and transparency. Virtually no feature or plugin requires payment for installation and use. In this regard, Discourse will outshine all other community forums.
The administrators who utilize Discourse as a community template are largely drawn to this feature, as they do not need to expend substantial funds on ornate themes and templates. They merely need to focus on providing excellent website services and offering feedback to users through Discourse.
Wordpress is “open source” and look how many billions that generates. The way Discourse is run can carry on as normal, this will be seperate entity and a case of 'buy the fancy themes or plugins or don’t. Imagine a load of new devs ideas, plugins etc
Wordpress is “open source” and look how many billions that generates. The way Discourse is run can carry on as normal, this will be seperate entity and a case of 'buy the fancy themes or plugins or don’t. Imagine a load of new devs ideas, plugins etc. it would encourage growth of the Discourse platform.
Basically a way of supporting devs like @awesomerobot who has created possibly the best theme on Discourse.
have 2 sides, 1 side would be how it is now but offer the choice of paid themes and plugins to help developers. Thats literally how wordpress grew and gained devs.
That’s a great idea. It’s also similar to the setup I had when I was testing Discourse comment functionality. Discourse topics were published to a lightweight Remix/React site via Discourse webhooks. Comments created on the website appeared both on the website and on Discourse.
Having both services be powered directly by Discourse would take care of most of the issues I was running into.
If I was designing this, I’d stress having a super fast loading blog in front of the traditional Discourse application. That approach would also deal with the ongoing issue of slow load times for the full Discourse application.
There are a bunch of reasons why something along these lines would be useful. I’ll add a couple more:
It’s socially a lot less awkward to start a blog than it is to start an online community. If you’ve got no users, starting an online community feels weird. It would be great to be able to get a community off the ground by just publishing a bunch of blog posts.
In the age of LLMs, note taking applications are very popular. There’s a natural drive to want to publish notes to the internet. I think there’s also a need for it, or we’re going to end up with less shared knowledge. Publishing notes directly to Discourse is doable, but it would feel more natural to publish them to a blog-type site that had Discourse as its back end.
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