I'm looking at migrating an existing Lefora (www.lefora.com) forum into Discourse.
I get the impression that some of the core developers aren't keen on migrations:
However, for our forum, my guess is they might not like it if all the old content disappeared, or wasn't searchable from the same location - so hopefully if we can migrate data across, it might ease some of their concerns.
Apparently there is a Discourse specific import/export format:
However, I can't seem to find the specs for this anywhere, or any docs on it at all.
Looks like you guys a building in all sorts of nice features. My community is not very tech savy so I try to keep my system as simple as can be... which means turning off a lot of "features". Often that has required custom coding.
Sure would be nice if most features were turn-off-able via a setting without having to modify the code or templates involved. Perhaps it is already that way, I confess I haven't looked.
I sure hope Jeff or other technical representative of Discouse shows up at this year's ForumCon! Seems like there is another new kid on the forum block: Moot! I sure would love to have a session where the new technologies are compared and contrasted!
I know I'd like to visit various new Discourse servers once in awhile as they come up. As you'd like a visitor or two, please post your URL here and a description of the purpose of your site and any other notes...
Update: I've finished developing this. You can find the entire patchset at the pull-request with the three features as three commits in the same order.
I am on the quest on supporting discourse to replace mailing lists (our internal google group system to be precise). One feature discourse is clearly missing to be able to replace mailing lists is to allow the creation of new topics via email. I call this Email-In. These are the three development steps I currently see:
1. General Email in
let admins enable and define an incoming-email-address
parse every email to the email-address in the POP3-account
if it comes from a user of the forum and that user has a certain configurable trust level, post the message as a new topic in the forum
2. Email-In per Category
to reduce the noise, we are using categories people can mute and such
therefore it makes sense to allow to configure email-addresses per category if the general incoming-email-feature is enabled
an email to that address then will be posted in that category instead of globally
the privacy options for that category apply
3. Allowing "unknown" Email-In
mailing lists are also sometimes configured as "a shared inbox", allowing third parties to post to it
add another configuration option in the email-in-configuration (globally and per category) to allow emails from third-parties (off per default)
when an email arrives in the inbox, that is not by any user known to the system, the header and its content will be posted as a quote in a new topic by the configured "system"-user
also emails by users without the appropriate rights would be handled this way
Any feedback, ideas, features or other uses cases I might should consider, too?
I'd like to see it be possible to subscribe to a forum for email updates and be able to unsubscribe to a particular thread while staying subscribed to a forum for email updates (either via individual emails or digest).
Also I'd like to see a subscription option of just new threads that made it easy then to follow selected new threads.
Really need this button, i actively use forums.inovaestudios.com and when i go check for New or Unread topics i get dozens of topics i already read or know/visited that i have no way to get rid off that list.
So when i click on Unread i get more than 30 topics, i need to have a "Mark all read" button to mark them all as read so next time i click Unread it will show up as "Unread (0)" and have no unread topics (unless new topics are added since).
Right now i can't use that forum and have no way of finding the topics i am interested to participate in.
It would be nice to have a plugin for static site generators like Jekyll or Octopress, since the performance and security benefits of those platforms are significant if you would take the time to learn it.
We've created a native mobile app for iOS that can be found here:
It allows some of the core features such as viewing topics, categories, comments, and favorites, as well as creating new topics and messages. It also supports multiple Discourse accounts.
Although Apple won't let us brand it as a beta, it's still in a beta phase. We were interested in getting some feedback from the community.
It would be really great to also get some type of notice of API changes here in case of future API changes revolving around the features that the app uses as well, if it's possible.
Deploying Discourse on Docker is currently our recommended setup. It avoids many pitfalls installations have, such as misconfigured nginx, sub-optimal Ruby defaults and so on.
The Docker based setup ensures we are all on the same page when diagnosing installation issues and completely eradicates a class of support calls.
Today, all sites hosted by Discourse are on Docker.
This is a basic guide on how to move your current Discourse setup to a Docker based setup.
Bind the web to a different port than port 80, if you are on the same box. Eg:
expose:
- "81:80"
Be sure to enter your email in the developer email section, so you get admin:
env:
# your email here
DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS: 'my_email@email.com'
Make sure email is setup and working by visiting /admin/email and sending a test email.
Make sure you have ssh access to your container ./launcher ssh my_container must work.
If any of the above is skipped your migration will fail.
At the end of this process you will have a working website. Carry on.
Exporting and importing the old site
Ensure you are running the absolute latest version of Discourse. We had bugs in the export code in the past, make sure you are on latest before attempting an export.
On your current instance
go to /admin/backups and click on the button.
once the backup is done, you will be able to it.
On your newly installed docker instance
enable the allow_restore site setting
refresh your browser for the change to be taken into account
Loving the new Docker install, setting it up and migrating from the old Ubuntu setup was a breeze. I really enjoy the new setup.
One question I have is how I can install plugins that will survive the destroy/bootstrap process. I'm still kinda confused on how that actually works. I really want to get the spoiler plugin back on my site.
I've setup Discourse as per the Docker guide on EC2.
When I go to Admin, one of the things it says is:
The server is configured to create thumbnails of large images, but ImageMagick is not installed. Install ImageMagick using your favorite package manager or download the latest release.
I thought ImageMagick would be something that would be bundled as part of the Docker image?
Or do you need to manually install it inside Docker?
I am looking to customize the header on my Discourse site. Specifically, I want to add another icon next to my logo that links to an external website. What is the best way to go about doing this?
I wanted to request on my yesterday's bug post to be closed as it is not reproducible. It might have happened due to user's typing / editing mistake. But then I am not even seeing my yesterday's topic.
Shouldn't I get warning / PM / reason something if I am doing something wrong here and moderator has taken a action?
button.
it.
your backup.
button
