After playing with the Wiki feature in Discourse (I’m the owner of the thunderbolt thread), I can say I’ve found it to be rather lacking. The narrow layout of the website does not play well with wide tables like I’d like to have in that thread (such as a column for every testing point so we make sure not to forget any) and the lack of formatting options (e.g. for code) is rather unfortunate.
The Framework Guides are a great addition for things like assembly/disassembly instructions, however for community-curated content, I see a couple of options.
- A MediaWiki site. There is already a large audience of people who understand the engine from being Wikipedia editors or from maintaining other sites run using the software. The downsides to this solution is the need for dedicated hosting and either support from Frame.work or trusted members of the community to administrate and moderate full time.
- A generated static site. This can be hosted for free on GitHub (with free SSL or some existing SSL certificate) and can be run fairly self-sufficiently by the community without support from Frame.work employees, which could make it more attractive. There is a bit more up-front setup and we would need a GitHub repo for it (possibly under the existing Frame.work organization) and they would need to make a team for community contributors, though this is not much work on their end. It also includes change tracking systems and the ability to approve or deny changes, which guarantees protection from vandalism edits. Content is typically written in Markdown, which is already being used in Discourse, so we have that going for us.
I have moved from MediaWiki to static sites for all of my community-contributed content and have seen decent adoption. While the GitHub flow is new for some, the tools built into the website for one-off changes are pretty strong, and for large contributors, learning to use Git is not difficult especially with the multitude of GUI-based tools. A contribution guide can be included to walk new users through making edits.
Personally I use statiq for its C# Razor support which provides a lot of flexibility in building the site, though Jekyll and Hugo are also popular options.
If we have an interest, I can set up a sample repo using Framework’s site theme as a base and submit it for review.
