Draft Version 0.1:
First Draft of Community Policy for Site Features and Change Requests
Introduction
Community is built on Discourse, an open source Internet forum application founded in 2013 by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron. Discourse received funding from First Round Capital and Greylock Partners. The application is written with Ember.js and Ruby on Rails.
Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum browser requirements are high.
Discourse supports the latest, stable releases of all major browsers and platforms:
- Microsoft Edge
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla Firefox
- Apple Safari
Read More: https://www.discourse.org/about
Core Feature of Discourse
Discourse is 100% open source, this means that the code belongs to everyone, including you. Built by a large, vibrant community, and maintained on GitHub, Discourse is available to download, install and modify yourself.
GitHub: Discourse · GitHub
This means that everyone and anyone can make changes to the look and feel via "theme components" and "plugins". More on this in the next section.
Read More: Discourse features | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
The Look and Feel of Community
At this time, Our community provides nine themes for users, seven "regular" themes and two "wide" themes. You can select these themes under the hamburger menu at the top right of the site.
If you do not like any of the nine themes provided "out of the box" you can search the Internet and find a Discourse theme you like. We will consider installing your theme recommendation or creation on a "per theme" basis. In addition, you can design your own theme and we will also consider installing it.
Read More: Theme Creator, create and show themes without installing Discourse! - announcements - Discourse Meta
Read More: https://meta.discourse.org/t/developer-s-guide-to-discourse-themes/93648
Since Discourse is open source, there is a big community to turn to for support. So, you have any questions about Discourse theme development, please ask your questions at the Discourse support site.
Read More: Topics tagged themes
If you create a new theme for our site, please also make it available to all Discourse communities on GitHub.
Community Features
Did I mention that the Discourse software which drives this community is 100% open source and supported by a vibrant team of software developers?
This means that if there is any feature you would like to see added to this site, you have two key paths to go down:
- Build a Discourse plugin yourself and suggest we add the plugin to our community.
- Pay a Discourse plugin developer to develop the plugin for you.
Read More: https://meta.discourse.org/t/beginners-guide-to-creating-discourse-plugins-part-1/30515
Read More: marketplace - Discourse Meta
If you don't want to develop a plugin, you can ask a professional plugin developer to create the plugin for you. Small changes and features requests are normally not expensive, and can be under $100 USD. Some plugin developers at meta might help you build a plugin for free, others might charge you only $50.
Plugin Example 1: Legacy Forum Thread ID in Topics for Moderators
During the migration process, @Scrutinzer wanted to have a link in each topic which pointed back to the original forum thread before the migration so the migration team could easily check the data integrity and have a easy reference for any manual changes that might be required due to how Discourse converts legacy bbcode to markdown. This is a "staff only" feature not available in the standard Discourse software release(s).
Because @Scrutinizer made very significant contributions to the migration process, a topic which I will document some day in the future, I tried to repay his kindness to the community by writing a Discourse plugin and completed the beta version of this plugin a few days ago:
Read More: [DONE] Requirements for Discourse Plugin for Topic Serializer (API) v2 - #5 by Neo
Because this was my first Discourse plugin, I was willing to pay a developer to write it, as I was struggling a bit with some Discourse-specific technical issues, and posted my requirement in the meta marketplace.
Within a few minutes of posting, @spirobel send me a message and offered to coach me a bit. With his kind and generous coaching, I was able to complete this plugin the next day. We are live testing that plugin now here at Community and I have made the source code available to other migrators who might have a similar requirement.
Plugin Example 2: Turn Off Auto-Bumping on a Per User Basis
Let's say there is some feature you don't really like and you want to turn it off; and there is no way to turn it off in your profile preferences tab. For example, lets say the Discourse feature of auto-bumping a few posts up on a daily basis is annoying to you. Not a problem! You can follow the path from above:
- Build a Discourse plugin yourself and suggest we add the plugin to our community.
- Pay a Discourse plugin developer to develop the plugin for you.
If we agree that the proposed plugin adds value to our Community members, we will install the plugin here.
If you plan to build a plugin for our site, please post your ideas and requirements in the community so we can give you some ideas and share any concerns or issues.
Wrap Up
Did I mention yet that the software which drives this community is 100% free and source?
Join the community and develop themes, theme components and plugins for not only our community, but for all Discourse communities.
This is the spirt of both Discourse and our community. We are happy to consider adding any theme of feature you build and develop; and if there is some UI requirement you have, you can easily build your own theme (or pay to have it built) and we may make if available to everyone. If you don't like a feature of the forum, no worries, you can discuss your requirement openly here and you can build a plugin for the site (or pay to have it coded) and share that plugin with all other Discourse forums.
This is what 100% free and open source is all about! This is a technical community full of many great coders and programmers. Please do not complain about features, colors, sizes or anything you may, or may, not like, and ask others, or imply indirectly, to modify features and themes. Bring us a proposed solution and join the open source community.