A user, Ariel_Bissett, is seeking a plugin or workaround for users to share “status updates” on their profiles, similar to a journal entry, to track their progress during a week-long reading event.
Merefield suggests two alternatives: using the core Discourse feature “Featured Topic” for a single topic, which appears on the user card, or utilizing the “portfolio” feature from the Topic List Previews plugin or Theme Component, which allows multiple personal topics to be displayed on the user profile.
Pacharanero notes that the Reflection plugin is more suited for private reflection and wouldn’t fulfill the request for a public journal tab. However, they mention that creating a public journal tab similar to the Reflection plugin wouldn’t be difficult.
Codinghorror confirms that the “Featured Topic” core feature is intended for this use case, allowing users to create a status update topic and feature it on their user profile.
Does anyone know of a plugin (or a clever work around!) for having “status updates” for users? Our community is using our discourse set up to share their reading during a week long period and I’d love to have a tab on their profiles where they could share how their reading is going, what they’ve finished reading, etc.
It’d be really fun to be able to visit someone’s page and see a bit of a journal entry of their thoughts throughout the week. Even if it was just a field they filled out every day and published or something. Any ideas?
An out of the box no TC or plugin solution is to make people select a single Topic for their Featured Topic, which is a core Discourse feature and do their updates there. This appears as a link on their user card. Supports one Topic only.
If you want something more complex to support multiple personal topics, in terms of open source work you could look at the ‘portfolio’ feature I wrote with the support of client funding in topic list previews plugin or Theme Component:
which allows a person to keep a set of special topics on their user profile. It places an additional route in User Activity. An additional ‘portfolio’ button on their user card takes you there for more easy discovery. These topics are distinguished with a site set tag or category. You can easily rename that feature from settings from ‘Portfolio’ to whatever you like.
Here’s an example in the wild: https://rideabl.es/u/scoota/activity/portfolio (currently filtered on ‘featured’. I renamed it Featured). This is currently in Tiles layout on desktop , but you can change that to look like a normal Topic List. It supports image previews on desktop as you can see. On mobile the view is a simpler, straightforward topic list.
The Reflection plugin is more of a way to use ‘PMs to self’ for private reflection on your learning. This request seems to be asking for something more public - it’s about publishing some kind of ‘status update’ to the other users. It wouldn’t take much to create some kind of public journal tab that did similar though…
@merefield’s Portfolio might be able to fulfil some of the OP’s use-case too
Yes, this is precisely what the feature is intended for. Create your status update topic, then make it a featured topic on your user profile (via your user preferences) and it’ll show up on your user card, etc.