Community Forum

As is usual for software projects in the open source sector, there is a forum for users and developers to discuss questions about the KNIME software (application, extensions, development). KNIME has a worldwide, very active community with over 25,000 members. The forum is an extremely important point of contact for users - originally created as a forum in Drupal 6, the presentation and user experience of the forum was no longer up to date, so an overhaul was urgently needed.

Discourse as forum software

As a high-end solution in the field of forum software, Discourse stands out: in terms of user-friendliness and performance, the software, which is used to operate a number of very large and professional forums, has set new standards. Developed by the founders of Stack Overflow, Discourse naturally also has a strong, professional foundation.

Discourse is implemented in Ruby on Rails and in JavaScript (with Ember.js as famework). A special feature of the software is its detailed REST API and the structure of the entire system around this API: Instead of being "just" another interface to the server or the software, this very API is also addressed via JavaScript during normal use of the forum software in the web browser, so that it forms the backbone of the software on the one hand and eliminates the need to process the browser output on the server side on the other.

Migration of users and content

The previous KNIME forum was already a heavyweight: with around 25 thousand users worldwide, around 20,000 topics and a multiple of comments, the question naturally arose as to whether and how the previous content could be transferred so as not to lose the collected, valuable questions and approaches to solutions.

Since Discourse's REST API leaves nothing to be desired in terms of its range of functions, it was also a key tool here. To migrate the content from Drupal to Discourse, we wrote a Drush script that runs through the forum nodes in Drupal and creates the corresponding content, users and comments for each of these nodes in Discourse via the REST API.

The forum has now been running practically 100% stable for months and is enjoying growing popularity - not only with external users, but also with the moderators of KNIME AG: because they also benefit enormously from the increased user experience and performance.