Suggestion for Wordpress plugin settings improvement

Continuing the discussion from Hide topic until first reply:

Not a bad idea. However, I think the settings page could use some TLC before adding more checkboxes.

In particular, I think it would be better if you had more dropdown menus like the category selector to specify the defaults, and one or more checkboxes to specify whether to force the default behavior.

Default Publish behavior [dropdown]:
- Publish to Discourse
- Don’t publish to discourse

Force default publish behavior [checkbox]

As it is, there are two checkboxes that allow for the logical impossibility of not defaulting to publishing, but forcing publishing.

And as long as I’m dreaming, allowing different defaults for different WP categories would… rock. :slight_smile:

Maybe the setting names and descriptions can be improved. Auto Publish marks posts to be published on Discourse. All it does is pre-check the ‘Publish post to Discourse’ checkbox that is found on the post edit page. If they wish, an author can uncheck the checkbox before publishing a post. I’m not sure that this setting is very helpful, but I’m wary of removing settings that people may be using.

Force Publish forces all posts to be published to Discourse, it cannot be overridden. That setting was added to help a site where authors were sometimes unchecking the ‘Publish post to Discourse’ checkbox. There is a warning about it in the setting’s description. Checking both Auto Publish and Force Publish doesn’t cause any kind of error. If that is done, the Force Publish setting will be applied.

There are a few cases on the Settings pages where contradictory settings are available, for example the Use Discourse Comments and the Link to Comments Without Displaying Them settings. If someone attempts to enable both settings, a warning is displayed saying that both settings cannot be enabled. A dropdown menu would be a better alternative here.

I like the idea of being able to map WordPress categories to Discourse categories.

3 Likes