In a discussion titled “What plugins do you recommend?” within the Community category, iraszl shares that their Graphic Design Forum has successfully transitioned from vBulletin to Discourse and is now self-hosted, asking for plugin recommendations suited for a design-focused community. codinghorror emphasizes that Akismet is essential for combating human spammers. bartv, who runs a 3D graphics forum on blenderartists.org, highlights the Topic List Previews plugin as vital, especially when combined with a custom ‘grid view’ for image galleries, demonstrated here. Falco questions the mobile appearance of the grid view, sharing a screenshot that shows a misaligned layout, to which bartv acknowledges the issue and promises to investigate. eextra asks if additional spam protection beyond Akismet is used. wanghaisheng shares a screenshot of their homepage and asks about the plugins used there. bartv clarifies that the homepage uses Topic List Preview for thumbnails and the Header Links theme component for top navigation, while the ‘Blender News’ menu is a custom-built feature. The thread reflects community interest in visual enhancements, spam control, and mobile optimization for niche forums.
We’ve been running www.graphicdesignforum.com for a year on discourse now. We moved from vBulletin to discourse and been very happy since. Clean, fast, and stable. Just a few days ago we also moved to self hosting.
My question is what are the plugins you found useful for your community, and are there any plugins you think we may find useful in a Graphic Designer community.
Btw, if you guys need any help or advice with your logo or other design work, do let me know, happy to help!
Akismet is essential as there are so many human spammers out there now.
I run a 3D graphics forum on blenderartists.org. If I had to choose one plugin that’s essential for our type of community, it’s Topic List Previews. We’re using it in combination with a custom made ‘grid view’ plugin for better image galleries. You can see it in action here.
No, that’s not right. I’ll look in to that, thanks!
Do you use anything else to protect from spam and bot or just askimet ?
That’s Topic List Preview for the thumbnails and the Header Links theme component for the links at the top. The ‘Blender News’ menu is a custom component.
