Using Discourse as a News Blog and Forum - Any Known Good Examples?

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#1

Hi,

I have one site using Discourse in full forum mode. I’m looking at starting a new site with news and a forum and I’m wondering how hard it would be to just skip using Wordpress and try to make the site purely on Discourse.

Does anyone know any sites doing this in a nicely design way?
How would the response times (speed of the site) compare to a bootstrap 4, based Wordpress theme’d site? Any ideas?
How hard would this be to implement?
Would this make sense - easier to do than having both Wordpress/Bootstrap Theme, plus Discourse?

My goal would be to use only Discourse and have a “News” category of the forum show up on the left side of the screen (a photo would be included at the top of each posting in this category) and then the right side of the screen would be just a regular full forum view with all the posts.

Sort of like this (in high-concept form): Where in this case all the right hand side would be the forum posts in a right side column that is perhaps 40% of the width of the page.

850×600 67.6 KB

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#2

I guess you could do something like this with Page Publishing ?

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#3

Another thing to keep in mind is that our theme system is very flexible, have a look at:

Click on various categories and notice how everything transforms.

A theme similar to the picture you described is probably feasible but would require significant amounts of work and possibly some custom plugin. You would need a pretty serious budget to do something like this properly.

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#4

You can try News Plugin as a base of what you are looking for.

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#5

Jeff, Sam and 4ong, thanks for the feedback.

Given Sam’s feedback it seems like the most cost effective approach is still to use both Wordpress and Discourse to achieve what I want.

One question I had is regarding a longer term solution - it might eventually make sense to go all-Discourse. My key question is with regard to speed/processing requirements. Would a lightweight WordPress site respond faster or more slowly than a Discourse -only site? Which would be a higher performance site for mobile/low-bandwith environments (given the same content in both cases)?

I do like the News Plugin and would like to try it. @sam would it be possible to install the news plugin into my existing Discourse-hosted forum so I can test it out, and potentially incorporate it fully into my site. I’d love to be able to pull the “News” category from my forum onto the home page of my website.

As a side-question, any idea if Bootstrap 4 is the best approach for a fast, responsive wordpress site? I know this isn’t the place to ask, but you guys probably have some insights into this.

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#6

I echo what others have said about the news plugin. A great example of it used in the wild (to my knowledge) is Elektronauts

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#7

If you’re hosted with us, custom plugins are only eligible to be installed on Enterprise plans. Please reach out to team@discourse.org if you wish to discuss!

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#8

Sam - that News plugin looks almost exactly like I could work with. I would only want a much longer “recent forum activity” column on the right - and I’m hoping that would be usable.

I don’t need the design features like you pointed out in the Ludia forum. I just want a simple way to get the news to the home page, and to highlight ongoing forum discussions on the home page. Basically its just a news and forum website.

Do you still think it would cost a lot to implement?
How would the responsiveness/speed of this Discourse-only site, compare to a lightweight wordpress frontend? I’m very concerned about having a responsive site for mobile access.

#9

@BCHK Please see the below.

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