In the past few months I have been setting up a new online forum for nurses using the amazing Jeff Atwood created Discourse.
Discourse is a thoroughly modern open source online forum software on steroids. Everything about it screams five minutes from now – easy social networking logons, nice-n-easy markup to compose topics, a bleeding-edge Docker install, and a kind of no-page-refresh-necessary interaction that seems to me to be the new must have: are you listening WordPress Core?
While I am no hardcore developer I can appreciate modern JavaScript frameworks – Ember.js being what Discourse uses. And while I know WordPress is pushing the (equivalent?) Backbone.js and the soon to be in core JSON REST API – I do feel after my brief time with Discourse, that WordPress has serious catching up to do technically.
Interacting with a truly interactive website – as Discourse demonstrates – where everything stays up to date, page refreshes are occasional, with new information and changes happening as if on a local app and on-the-fly – well, again, this seems to me a real iteration of the whole web experience.
The web is alive!
