Using Discourse as a internal Knowledge Base / Intranet

funny that this thread is being reawakened now. I am working on this right now - we use discourse as a community forum and for internal staff discussions. I’d like to reconfigure things so it’s optimal for both, but it’s been a bit of a challenge. For example internal discussions swamp the frontpage for staff so sometimes it’s hard for them to see and deal with community discussions. For today I am trying out the “hide category from frontpage” setting and adding a link to that category on the top menu, visible only to staff.

I also am looking to create a wiki category with sub-categories, to contain operating procedures and how-to docs for staff. This is working well, especially with the “boxes with topics” category view - like the #howto category here - see screenshot. I like! I think it will be a big improvement over the google docs we were using previously for this purpose. Especially when considering that it can respect permissions and show people only the sub-category of procedures that they need to see according to their role.

Up next, I think, is to figure out a way to present the wiki topics in a structured interface externally, so it can be used without the distraction of discourse discussion features, safely also when discourse is down, and also perhaps even offline saved as structured PDFs.

The learndiscourse experiment might be a help for this - and if anyone has done it recently with success and has a recipe for it I’d love to see it! Sadly, learndiscourse.org is not working right now.

https://github.com/erlend-sh/learndiscourse/blob/gh-pages/about.md

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