I did some searching and I didn’t see a stack for adding Discourse forums to a RW site. What is the easiest way to do so? I would like to create a community social network for a specific group of people. Thanks!
Discourse is a stand-alone product. You can install it yourself or they also offer a hosted version. Its not really a simple addon type of product, kinda of complex. You could run it as a sub domain and link to it from a RapidWeaver site.
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How about https://disqus.com ?
There are also stacks to integrate it
like https://rapidweavercommunity.com/addons/stacks/disqus-stack or https://www.weavers.space
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I have used disqus and it works fine, but I’m looking for something a little more powerful and not single page based. Thanks
I’ll look into using Discourse on a sub domain. I will probably need a solution that has both free and paid community members. Not sure how to do that yet.
I’ve never setup Discourse. This forum we’re on right now is using it.
Depending on your needs you can have a look at https://www.question2answer.org
It’s not as full featured as Discourse but more than disqus. Kinda of in between the two.
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TL;DR executive summary: pay for the service, link to it. Add custom DNS to make it seem like it’s part of your site.
But running fancy forum software yourself can be fun too. I’ve set up a few, if you have any questions, let me know.
Also: not really related at all… I’ve been thinking of setting up a dedicated YourHead discourse forum. What do you guys think? I know there are already too many forums with Stacks info… I’m just kind of addicted to setting them up. LOL.
Hosting your own discourse server is not for the timid. You’ll need to be familiar with running a VPS, installing software using a Docker container, ssl certs, etc. Discourse is a full multi-user, (potentially) multi-server, database driven application. And that’s just the beginning. You’ll need to maintain that server, installing patches, backing up, dealing with hackers and other internet crises.
The have an install Guide if you’re interested in digging in.
I shouldn’t scare you off. If you are familiar with some basics of linux and web servers then it’s not bad at all. And it is very well documented.
Most normal non-
would probably just go to https://www.discourse.org/ and pay $100/month for the service. They run everything for you and take care of the details.
If you search google for “managed discourse hosting” you’ll get some cheaper options too. $20/month seems to be the going rate.
Until only a few days ago I ran a Q2A based site. (Yes, I recently took down our little Answer Cafe site – I suspect I was nearly the only one using it LOL)
It’s not a Discourse clone, though. It’s aiming to be closer to stackoverflow.com (fyi: both Discourse and Stack Overflow were started by the same guy Jeff Atwood a.k.a. @codinghorror on twitter. Or, well, he’s the co-creator of both.) StackOverflow/StackExchange isn’t open source so there are a lot of clones.
Q2A is probably not the best, but it’s php, pretty easy to install, and highly customizable. Some of the other popular Stack Overflow clones have really heft server requirements.
Since Q2A runs on php you can use install it on a plain old Apache web server. You’ll need a database, and some other skills, but it’s pretty doable.
That said, running a web app like this on a traditional server is now a pretty old fashioned way of doing things – so I suspect that interest in Q2A might be drying up.
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