Having thought long and hard about how to organise the weather-watch.com site I’ve come to a conclusion about what to do…
I’d long had the thought of creating a ‘community’ or kind of social media site to integrate with the forum and that’s where community.weather-watch.com came in. I started that project before I found Discourse, and eventually moved the forum to it. I’d been looking for a good forum, at leas tas good as SMF, that integrated with the WordPress software used by Community, but never found anything.
Having moved the forum to Discourse I’ve been considering what to do with Community. I’ve integrated it to some extent, e.g. the forum accounts will log you into Community, but beyond that Community has been a very quiet backwater with little access to it.
I realised that many of the things I wanted to do with Community were equally possible to do in Discourse, so I’ve now concluded that Community will go away. I still have things to move, so you’ll see some new things in the forum as I find ways to handle the things that Community does, and more importantly to make use of the data that is currently held within it. You’ve seen the start of that recently with the move of the Weather Station and WxSim maps into a non-Wordpress solution, and today with the creation of the calendar/events sub-category.
Whilst I have to plan/implement the move away from Community, in the longer term it will make life easier for me because I’ll only have one solution to manage rather than two. The Wordpress instance used by Community is a bit of a beast to manage with many plugins, theme components, etc to feed and water on a regular basis. And, you know me, always love tinkering with things so I’ll enjoy the journey 