Discourse multi-site?

When discussing linking our blog to our Discourse, it was pointed out that currently you can only link one blog to one Discourse install. As Mozilla has a ton of sub-groups there are other ways in which we would want to treat a single discourse platform like many, per category moderators/admins for instance.

So here’s a question:

We could either try to solve the problems of making a single Discourse instance behave more like multiple instances, or we could try to make multiple instances of Discourse behave more like a single instance.

Pros of using multiple Discourses:

  • Different teams could connect their blog comments to their own Discourse out of the box
  • Maybe we’d still have to solve the problem of having multiple blogs post to different categories?
  • We could set administrators/moderators per instance out of the box
  • Single Sign-on would allow us to use one account per all instances
  • Any others?

Cons of using multiple Discourses:

  • Wouldn’t be able to move threads between instances
  • Is this a big deal?
  • Would it be possible to mirror threads across instances/move between instances even with hacking?
  • A user wouldn’t be able to manage all of their preferences at once out of the box
  • SSO makes it possible to build this feature
  • Feature parity/plugin maintenance, we’d need a solution for this
  • Anything else?

What have I missed? What do you guys think?

I’m not sure out of the box, but I expect it would be possible to do it with a plugin. The only issue might be how the date of a post is stored in the database, and if it’s editable from outside of it.

Yep - anything which can be done through the web interface can be done through the API (due to how Discourse is designed), so could be done on SSO.

@leo and myself were discussing this because of Mozilla Adocacy and I think that we should look into having multiple blog hosts for this instance rather than multiple instances. Is the extra functionality worth the fragmentation of discussions/cost/hacks for mirroring?

@leo, maybe you could look into it?