OpenEuphoria, Discourse, and you!
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) 2 weeks ago
- 311 views
After much deliberation amongst myself, I am strongly considering migrating this website to Discourse. I'm not keen on the idea of switching away from using software written in Euphoria, especially when we'd be switching to a "competing" language (Discourse is a Ruby on Rails app), but I think the pros far outweigh the cons in this case. Discourse is a mature open source project with hundreds of contributors and millions of users worldwide.
I've already been exploring the admin side of running a site and everything can be managed from the web interface. The only server-side work involved is the initial installation, migrating our data, and the occasional software upgrade (which is basically just a docker pull). Discourse comes with a whole suite of moderation features, supports wiki pages, and is almost endlessly customizable to fit our needs.
One caveat is that, like many modern web applications, Discourse is huge, at least compared to our current euweb platform. I would need to either expand the CPU/memory capacity of my current shared hosting VPS or provision a new VPS along side it (I'm leaning towards the latter) which would cost an additional $10/month to run. It's not a lot but it's twice what I'm paying now, although that's still less than the $20/mo "starter" hosting service offered by Discourse.
To support this effort and to help keep things moving forward, I would also like to introduce entirely optional paid memberships to the forum. This would likely come in the form of a small "pay what you can" monthly fee and a corresponding "premium" user badge. I don't want to paywall any part of the forum; everyone is welcome here and I want to keep it that way. Again, this would be entirely optional and provide purely cosmetic changes to those users.
The rough plan so far is this:
- Stand up an empty Discourse site
- Configure theming to match the current site
- Migrate the users table and verify access
- Migrate the messages table (the forum)
- Migrate the news table as a new topic
- Migrate the wiki table as a new topic
- Migrate the manual documents to GitHub
- Migrate the tickets table to GitHub
- Import dev mailing list from SourceForge? (optional)
- The downloads page is just a wiki page
- The recent page is already a Discourse feature
- Move messages around into categories (e.g. Phix, Off-topic, etc.)
Please discuss. I want as much input as possible before I decide to move forward. If we're in agreement I'll continue my efforts on this and hopefully complete the migration in early January.
-Greg
P.S. If I've seemed less involved here lately it's because we've been shopping for a house since September and we just signed on our new home last week. We're currently on track to move in the last weekend of December. The new house includes dedicated office space, which our apartment of the past ten years has sorely been lacking. This will give me more time and space to work on Euphoria. Good things are coming in 2025.
