Why isn't Discourse more frequently recommended as a "community platform"?

Yes, how to configure groups for a given purpose is the cause of a lot of confusion. The Setup Wizard could walk site owners through the process.

I’m imagining something like this:

  • the Wizard asks “What’s your community going to be used for?”
  • a selection of available templates is displayed
  • the site owner selects “customer support”
  • the Wizard walks the site owner through the process of configuring a “support” group: the group’s name, incoming email address, category, etc

Another site owner selects “paid subscriptions” from the Setup Wizard:

  • the Wizard walks them through the process of creating “subscribers” groups and categories
  • gives them the option of configuring the Patreon and Subscriptions plugins to limit access to the “subcribers” categories

Another site owner selects “teamwork” from the Setup Wizard…

There should be an “all the bells and whistles” option, but new site owners shouldn’t be forced to make sense of “all the bells and whistles” by default.

If a “configuration templates” approach was used, individual templates could be added in a similar way to how automations can be added to the Automation plugin.

It’s the time of year when we file our taxes in Canada. I’ve been using the (unironically) awesome TurboTax application. It’s an example of how HTML forms can be used to clarify an otherwise confusing process. The Setup Wizard could do something similar.

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