Talking Discourse: An Interview with Jeff Atwood

One of our company founders, Erica Brescia, recently spoke with Jeff Atwood to ask what to look forward to in the 1.0 release of Discourse. We use Discourse for the Bitnami community, and we distribute Discourse for one-click, easy installation with native installers, as virtual machines and into the cloud. 


The conversation covers a lot of ground including:

• Why Discourse is a big giant ball of javascript
• The MySQL and PHP ghetto
• The cure for PHP server herpes
• Upcoming features in Discourse 1.0
• Why working on small features can be better than the big ones
• And more

Listen to the interview now or read the full transcript below. Click to play, sit back, enjoy.

Full transcript

Erica Brescia: Hi, this is Erica Brescia.  I'm one of the founders of Bitnami and I'm fortunate to have Jeff Atwood here, one of the creators of Discourse to talk a little bit about the Discourse project and what they have coming in the future as they work up to the 1.0 release.  So Jeff, thanks so much for joining me.

Jeff Atwood: Oh, you're welcome.  It's great to be here.

EB: And to start out, you know, discourse is, while popular still, a fairly new project.  I'd love it if you could tell Bitnami users a little bit about the project and what made you decide to start Discourse.

JA: Sure, so the main thing that motivated Discourse was that I couldn't find any forums that I felt comfortable recommending to people that needed communities.  And community is so important on the web and it just made me a little bit sad really that all the options I could find were ones I would nota feel comfortable installing myself.  They just weren't modern for lack of a better word.  There was a lot of really legacy stuff, legacy technology and there was no like leader.  There was nothing like if you were gonna set up a blog and you talk to somebody about it, somebody will say to you WordPress at some point because it's kind of the obvious choice.  It's open source, it's got a great ecosystem.  

You know it's essentially free and there are so many ways to host it and there are so many plug-ins.  And I want there to be something like that for forums because this idea that you have people talking to each other about a topic is really essential I think to a lot of businesses and a lot of communities too.  So discourse is supposed to be, intended to be the WordPress of forums essentially.  That's what we're shooting for.

An Introduction to Discourse

If you're looking at building a new community or refreshing an old one, Discourse should be on your short list of systems to consider. Discussion forums have been a part of the web for a long, long time. If we compare a 1990s web site with today, it’s clear that the art of web design has moved on a long way since then, yet web forums… haven’t really kept up. Discourse bills itself as a reboot of forum software for the next decade. Let's see why. 

The Discourse Design Philosophy

The Discourse project is spearheaded by Jeff Atwood, who was also a co-founder of Stack Exchange. With north of a hundred Stack Exchange Q&A boards around the web, it's clear that the new, modern design has resonated with web communities. Like Stack Exchange, Discourse set out to revitalize and modernize question and answer sites, and has been very successful, even inspiring quite a lot of competitors, such as OSQA. Discourse embodies a similar approach to forums.

Because Discourse was started from scratch recently, it has been relatively easy for the Discourse team to build modern web approaches directly into the core of the software. A small sampling of modern design touches include:

• Much greater emphasis on the conversation rather than the scaffolding of the web pages compared with older forums software
• New posts to a topic appear as you scroll down, rather than having a collection of minuscule “1, 2, 3, Next” links along the bottom
• Adding images to a forum post, for example, is done by modern dragging-and-dropping those images
• Responsive design for mobile users is built in
• If someone else posts to the thread you’re looking at then their addition shows up as you browse, without needing constant page refreshes to keep up
• Pasting a link to Wikipedia or YouTube or Amazon into a topic automatically “expands” that link to show the video or a summary of the article in question, saving readers from having to click through (and click away from your forum)

Unlike older systems, with Discourse, these features are native to the platform. Discourse itself is open source, and there’s a growing hacker community centered around the project and github; importantly, they’re not just interested in code contributions, but in our experience willing to help out with problems and listen to suggestions.

Installing Discourse

Discourse is implemented as a server which provides a JSON API, along with a JavaScript application which runs in the web browser and talks to that API. Discourse is built on Rails, Postgres, and Redis, and setting it up is done best on a public cloud (EC2, Rackspace, Azure) or Rails cloud hosting (Heroku, etc). The Discourse source contains step-by-step instructions for deploying to Heroku onto an Ubuntu server and others, but is made considerably easier by using something designed for the job. Obviously (at least we hope it is!), we provide one-click installs of Discourse to a local machine, as a virtual machine or into the cloud.

Discourse contains its own API, which at least in theory means that one never hits the situation where the forum provides a feature but the API doesn’t support it. However, because Discourse is still new and under heavy development, the API is a moving target. Support can be found on Discourse’s own support forum, meta.discourse.org.

What does this mean for the community manager or admin?

The Discourse team themselves are pretty clear that Discourse is best suited “for new discussion communities,” and not as a drop-in replacement for an existing forum full of posts and users and avatars. If you’re in the position of setting up such a thing, and you have easy installation or skilled devops available to you, Discourse is a good and modern tool to help you build a community. That community will thank you for it.

You’ll be ready for the next decade of discussion rather than trying to escape from the one before last, which means that you can get beyond fiddling with your forum software and instead focus on what you should be doing: enabling discourse.

Next steps

Check out the Discourse website or try Discourse free with Bitnami.

Discourse: modern forum platform now part of the BitNami library

We are happy to announce that Discourse is now part of the BitNami family! Discourse is a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform built on Ruby on Rails.

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of the popular network StackOverflow, solved the Q&A problem by essentially suppressing free-form discussion. He started the Discourse project last year with one goal in mind, to support a broader discussion without falling victim to the trolling and spam that afflict many other forums and comment threads.

You can now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

You can also download free, ready to run native installers for Linux and OS X, virtual machines and Azure & Amazon EC2 images. Discourse was included in BitNami because they were a winner of the BitNami bi-weekly packaging contest. Head over there to vote for the next application to be packaged or to suggest your own.

Discourse forum