Update: Simplified and divided into two plugins
Big thanks goes out to people who took the time to give feedback on the plugin idea. As pointed out, this can be simplified and even split up into two different plugins. What i boiled it down to are these two plugins:
Link plugin
Need to have features
- Ability to create link category where the WYSIWYG editor is replaced by a one-line link input field
- Link is shown and can be accessed from front page of discourse forum in thread list view
- In the thread itself, the link is the only content of the first post
Nice to have features
- If Discourse cannot create one-box from link, the link is a simplified one-box where favicon and title is fetched.
- Links are also shown in thread lists in digest mails from Discourse forum, so they can be accessed directly from your email client
- Links are checked when pasted into link input field (e.g. did you type in a valid URL)
Wireframes
Link category
One-line input field which checks if URL is valid
If the link points to a destination we cannot create one-box from, link is displayed in a similar fashion as one-box without all the info that is usually fetched. Preferably we fetch fav-icon and title from destination URL
Thread view - first post only contains link
Front (Ability to click links in grey box to go directly to external link)
Digest email (Ability to click links in grey box to go directly to external link)
Upvote plugin
Basically a plugin that disguises Discourse’ default ‘like-system’ as an upvote system which also gives users the ability to vote posts from front page.
Need to have features
- Ability to up-vote first post in a thread from front page of discourse forum
- Change of name from likes to up-votes
Wireframes
Front page voting
Click to give your vote. Click again to remove it.
What it looks like in the thread view (Votes on first original posts are the ones shown on front. Notice all likes have been changed to up-voting for consistency)
We need your help
We’re designers, not developers. We have no clue how to build this. We hope someone wants to build this for free as a community plugin, but if that is not the case we’re also interested in hearing from plugin developers to get a quote on how much this would cost to build.
We’re hoping to launch our website sometime within the next 1-2 months and would love to have this feature at launch.