There’s an elephant in the room here, and we need to acknowledge it. Discourse is not an HCL product. So why are we using it?
First off, those involved were intimately acquainted with the previous communities of Notes.net, developerWorks, and OpenNTF - both in terms of features and technology. So the decision was made with eyes wide open but also a careful assessment of open source options available.
The story began in summer 2023. A team of researchers were tasked with investigating what open source options were available, what they gave us out-of-the-box, and their flexibility for customization.
We knew what features products like Connections gave us out-of-the-box and the limits of customization. We knew what platforms like Domino, Leap, and Volt MX provided as a starting point, what was easy to build, and what was hard.
But how did open source options compare and what features were used by other open source communities that used them? You only know what you’re missing when you take a look at what others have!
And speed was critical. This was a short project, just a few weeks of investigation, then recommendations.
We’re not going to go through the list of options we looked at. One starting point was articles talking about options for communities. Another starting point was “xxxxxxxx has a community, what are they using?”.
Subsequent questions were what pedigree do they have, who is using it, what is the documentation like, how easy is it to get started, where can we go from there. With daily scrums, showing something in action within days was important.
And it’s also important to highlight that developer communities have proliferated over the last two decades. And it may be unpopular to say, but our products were not in the room when they developed. But our products were never intended for those audiences. But it means expectations are different. The 1990s mailing list paradigm is out-dated, even though some still exist.
Initial investigations led to a name that rang bells. One of the co-founders was Jeff Atwood, who had also co-founded Stack Overflow. But this felt like a different product for a different purpose, not a case of a disillusioned creator going off to create a new competitor because their original vision was no longer pre-eminent. Yes, there is the ability to do “forums”, but Discourse is much more.
The steps for setting it up were quite straightforward. We had a shared instance pretty quickly. And developers had Docker containers for local development.
The documentation is thorough, mature and helpful. That includes extensive developer guides. Plus, it’s open source and so are all the plugins we’ve needed to use. So there are plenty of examples for how to do things.
The community is very active. There are a host of plugins, themes, and theme components. This means a lot of additional functionality available with a few clicks and (for plugins) a quick restart of the server.
Yes, it’s an unfamiliar technology - EmberJS for the front-end, Ruby for the backend. But the EmberJS part, with Handlebars templates, is not difficult to get started with and EmberJS has its own documentation and community…built on Discourse! The technology has changed over the last couple of years, embracing componentization, which has had a knock-on to Discourse’s code. But that huge change has settled down now - with increased flexibility in the product. And a huge amount can be done without needing to do any Ruby coding. In fact, all of our customizations have been done without Ruby - aided by the benefit that we have other REST service and database options!
And Discourse itself is hugely configurable. There are a vast array of configuration options on the admin side, many reports available, powerful security options, and flexible user management and gamification settings. There’s a welcome bot - as you may have seen - with configuration. And an out-of-the-box mobile application which has its own styling but automatically reflects any customizations we make.
Within a few weeks we had a quite sophisticated site, branded, demonstrating a wide array of functionality. We were far from a finished site.
But it was clear that Discourse was the best open source option and the right tool for the job.
As ever in business, other priorities took precedence. But a few months ago a group was tasked with building out a site, in addition to their day jobs.
Progress was pretty rapid, considering those involved were also delivering releases of other products as well! Designers helped shape the look and feel. Aspects like group-specific colouring was added. Some theme components and plugins were ported from the development site. Some additional plugins were investigated and found not right for our needs. Some other plugins were found and integrated. A site structure and navigation was built out. Additional integrations and external sites were added.
The site was expanded to other internal developers and demoed to senior management. And additional people gathered for launch.
At every point, whenever there was a question of how to do something, it was highly encouraging to find the answer quickly on Discourse’s forums. This is undoubtedly the right choice of platform, and we look forward to improving it over the coming years.