Discourse the Answer to WordPress

Discourse is a thoroughly modern open source online forum software on steroids. When I first wrote this chapter some time ago, everything about it screamed five minutes from now – easy social networking logons, nice-n-easy markup to compose topics, a bleeding-edge Docker install, and a kind of no-page-refresh-necessary interaction that seems to me to be the new must have: are you listening WordPress Core?

While I am no hardcore developer I can appreciate modern JavaScript frameworks – Ember.js being what Discourse uses. And while I know WordPress is pushing the (equivalent?) Backbone.js and the soon to be in core JSON REST API – I do feel after my brief time with Discourse, that WordPress has serious catching up to do technically.

Interacting with a truly interactive website – as Discourse demonstrates – where everything stays up to date, page refreshes are occasional, with new information and changes happening as if on a local app and on-the-fly – well, again, this seems to me a real iteration of the whole web experience.

I managed to use the WordPress Discourse plugin to integrate the two platforms and as you can surmise: hope to push the WordPress team to open up the d/Discourse just a bit more.

The web is alive!