Maybe a week or two before Bubble added their discourse integration, I started work on a forum loosely based on the discourse platform. What follows are a few screenshots and a link to the forum itself:
Forum home page - complete with contributing users, last activity, and a simple filter by category dropdown.
This was far more fun to build since there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes magic going on for SEO purposes. Here, I checked what discourse does for their structured data approach by dropping one of the bubble topic’s URLs into google’s structured data testing tool. Now, rather than a google search result displaying just the topic’s URL, each post has a unique URL (by passing the post’s parameter to the URL) that is recognized by google. Fantastic for SEO and has a great impact on the relevance of your links in search results. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, PLEASE do some reading on google structured data and what it can do for your organic traffic - especially if you have a forum or any other content you wish to show up in search results.
There’s more to the forum as far as features go, but I’ll leave it here and just post the link. Users need to be signed in to get all the features (posting, liking, etc.), but you can get the gist of it.
It’s really tough to tell the man hours. The largest pain was getting the SEO bits to behave with the structured data. It took maybe a month, but that was full also full of an emergency trip back home and the birth of a baby (I’m still spending several hours a day in the NICU visiting him until he comes home… So, hard to estimate.
There’s a lot of work to be done to it before I’d want to stamp it with my name and put it out there for consumption (lots of platform-specific stuff in the data structure and the like), but a template wouldn’t be out of the question once I got it to where I wanted it.
Thanks! Building things with bubble is pretty damn fun… also slightly addictive. Building something semi-useful for yourself (and your users) from time to time is also nice
Since initially posting this (a whopping 2 days ago), I moved it over to convert it into a template. It’s still lacking in a few areas (basically nil on admin functionality, for example) and I’m balancing this project with a new tiny human, so it’ll take some time, but it’s on the way!
A forum template (myForum) has “officially” become my side project. So, between changing poopie diapers and other bubble-related activities, this will be in the works. Today’s updates:
Profile page with user activity and summary
More intuitive in line responses to posts on the /topic page.
Main forum page:
Not much change here. Basically the same functionality of the bubble/discourse main forum page.
Profile page:
Work still needs to be done, but the flow is basically there. More things like flags, badges (maybe), and notifications will be included eventually.
topic page:
Changed the ‘view replies’ UI to be in-line with the original post with an option to scroll to an individual post. Much more intuitive than the popup I was using before.
Anyway, using spare time, I’m giving myself until the end of the month to make this thing useable. Hopefully I can actually hit my own deadline
