Forum suggestions: resources & custom bbcode werk

Resources
Almost daily in the office I check this forum, sometimes also the other resources you provide. But to get to those, I default go to your main website and then go to specific other site, like docs, kb, werks, features.

Suggestion: under hamburger menu add a group called Resources and add direct links to the different sites you offer.

Custom bbcode werk
Especially the announcement of a new release contain a listing of a lot of werks. But sometimes a werk is mentioned in a post for a solution to a problem. It would be nice if werk numbers would automagically link to the werk page by making a custom bbcode [werk]. This would also avoid typos in werk number since the render of the code shows the description belonging to werk. And would imagine it saves a bit of time making new release announcements. (-:

Example:
[werk]14470[/werk] would render into Werk 14470: Fix host label search in monitoring search and quicksearch
Optional add icons telling level and class of werk to make it prettier. But this might give extra headaches regarding light and dark forum theme.


Additional, not forum related, but werk and i8n related:
When you have a werk detail page in English and want to go to the German version you get a 404 error. Reversed from German to English a 404 is shown too.

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Hello Yggy!
Sorry for a delayed reply – I’m still in the learning mode :slight_smile:

Thank you for the suggestions and the bug report on the language switching – that one will be looked into by the team next week.

About the 2 suggestions – both sound interesting.

For the first one I need some details. If you are comfortable we could have a quick call, or I could also do with screenshots: like where would you like to see the resources, so I could try and see if it is something we could do.

With werks I’ll do a little research as well if we could turn them into links, and we’ll go from there.
What do you think?

I guess he means the cross linking of the community pages. From the forum you actually have no link back to the main checkmk page nor to the documentation, exchange or feature portal. In some cases it would be quite handy to have a collection of the community pages on all community pages to jump between them easily.

3 Likes

Hi Sara,

Not working on Fridays.
No worries, you replied, so all good.
And ain’t we all in constant learning mode?

The logical placement for the resources / pages on the forum might be here:
image

About werks, I’ve read people made custom bbcode in the past to have special link functionality in their Discourse site, so it should be possible. But missing indepth Discourse knowledge as admin, only have a bit as a user here, the information turned hocus pocus to me fast. So thought, maybe your new Tribe might be better figuring it out and doing the coding magic. :wink:

Yes … that is what I meant.

Got it :+1:

So, at the moment:
The hamburger menu links should be possible (with a little magic of course :wink: ) but I’ll need some time to discuss it with one of the magicians :man_mage:.

The language switch 404 on the website – reported to the person who will fix this.

Werk links – in process of research but also looks very promising.

I’ll keep you updated :blush:

3 Likes

Hello all! Updates time :slight_smile:

So, out of these suggestions:

  • Release messages on the forum now have werk links in them :partying_face:
  • Hamburger menu options are unfortunately a bit limited by the forum platform, so no good news there
  • Error on the website should be fixed now too

:vulcan_salute:

2 Likes

Thanks!

Is there a specific syntax or code needed, so others can make werk links too?

Hi Yggy!

For now, it is just having the links in the announcements, so you could see and get the links to werks in the forum. I am sorry if I misunderstood your main idea for this change.

The thing with BBCode is a bit complicated here. Discourse (the base platform for the forum) needs to have a special plugin enabled for BBCode – and it comes with certain risks.

First of all, once enabled, it will allow to use the BBCode in terms of formatting the text in different ways that could disrupt the way we format it now through Markdown. And the most important thing – I do not think it supports custom BBCode. But I believe, in theory, this could be implemented through the code of the forum somehow.

The issue I see here is that when we need to post werks here in posts, we still would need to look up their number – and we can at the same time get the link to the werk that is now available in the announcements category. BBCode would make the process of typing a bit easier, I agree, but I am not sure the amount of work it would require to implement it and to make sure enabling BBCode generally does not break anything might not be worth it.

It is possible I do not see some important point here, some use case that you often face – if you share I could talk to the developers who could possibly make it work. For now, I am simply not sure if I could make a strong enough argument for this :thinking:

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I didn’t know what Discourse was using as parser of tag codes. I knew of existence BBCode in old fora, so named that.

Guess for Discourse it is more important to find out if you can extend the Markdown parser to have custom tag codes available. Or perhaps (mis)use GFM autolinking feature with custom code based on some fake protocol werk:14470 to change it into a link.

I assumed that when a new Checkmk release is made by github or whatever, it is giving the werk numbers as changelog export, and it is just a ‘simple’ copy paste to the forum. Turning it into links on the forum manually would create more work.

The changelog might even be autogenerated like the werk pages are. Example https://checkmk.com/werk/14470 looks like a pretty html output version of their Github source https://github.com/tribe29/checkmk/blob/master/.werks/14470. So assuming a new werk added in Github might auto sync into a new werk on https://checkmk.com/werk/

I was mostly thinking of a cool unique feature useful for this forum, but important after all if the work, to realise it, is worth it. Not for me to decide. (-: