Moving event data to Discourse?

So when we migrated to Discourse, I added the Events plugin to see how it worked - if you’re not already aware of it, head over to the Events category and note:

  • The “Agenda” view gives all events still in the future
  • The “Calendar” view has iCal / RSS subscriptions
  • Individual events also have “Add to Calendar”
  • Local timezones are respected
  • Events are still topics, so discussion of agendas etc can happen there

All very lovely. However, it’s duplicating data from the website, which is not good. I’m proposing that we drop the website implementation and handle all events on Discourse (and probably add an iframe to Discourse on the website, for continuity). This will lower duplication, but also lowers barrier to creating events, as any user of Trust Level 2+ can create events (and I can do other flexible things with groups).

We can also potentially stop posting the demo in multiple places (Events & Development) as the main event could be made into a wiki post, and users can add their demos to the post directly.

Overall I see shiny features and reduced overhead for little cost, so I’ll probably do it next week unless anyone has objections?

4 Likes

+1 to make use of Discourses events.

So I think we can consider Discourse as canonical at this point.

The Events plugin has been updated with Location stuff, and you can also psuedo-schedule events directly in a post using [date], e.g. “next coffee is on May 8, 2018 10:54 AM (Europe: Paris), May 8, 2018 9:54 AM (Europe: London), May 8, 2018 4:54 AM (America: New York), May 8, 2018 2:24 PM (Asia: Calcutta)” - see Site updates for more details.

Next is what to do with the website - I can see a few options

[import notes - poll data lost during re-import]

I lean towards a 302 redirect, especially for those who may have added the ICS to their calendar (the new link is webcal://community.theforeman.org/c/events/l/calendar.ics?time_zone=Europe/London for an anonymous viewer). Embedding the data in /events sounds nice but probably more work than its worth.