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Hung Vu
Hung Vu

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🌱Using Forem as an intranet website, yay or nay?

I'm looking into building an intranet website and is researching on available options. There are two solutions that I have at the moment:

  • DIY the website. This offers customizability but come at the cost of overhead such as development and maintenance time.
  • Use an existing open-source forum solutions like Forem, Discourse, NodeBB, etc. This cut down the overhead, but also reduces customizability (no tailored UX?) and might not scale well when requirements evolve.

Which options would you suggest? And what else should I consider? The draft requirements can be seen below:

  • There are 2 main classes of users: Authors, and readers. The authors have right to create contents (articles, videos), while the readers can only consume content. A user can only be one or another.
  • More advanced access control list: E.g., only authorized users can see the content.
  • Good user experience (navigation, search, organization, etc.) Cloud file-directory based options such as Google Workspace has become an obstacle for non-technical users in this specific environment.
  • Targeted audience: Certain type of content can be promoted or pin to dashboard of targeted audience.
  • User profile.
  • SSO.
  • Optional: Scheduling (calendar), and location (map) features.

Top comments (9)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern • Edited

We use Forem as an internal team knowledge base and place for team memos.

Forem is still a bit too hard to set up, and we haven't done a great job pinging people about updates, but once it's set up, it is very useful for this sort of thing.

Set it up fully and regularly update, and you'll have a great time!

forem.team

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hunghvu profile image
Hung Vu

Thank you, it's great to have a confirmation that Forem is a viable solution!

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liftoffstudios profile image
Liftoff Studios

I'd say you make a custom site if you're willing to spend the time since it's good for experience

But if you want a good set of features immediately make use of an existing project

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hunghvu profile image
Hung Vu

So that makes me wonder if there are any other options out there. In business context, the more options the better.

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liftoffstudios profile image
Liftoff Studios

There are many such as forem and discourse
A google search for "Forum open source" will yield many such

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hunghvu profile image
Hung Vu

I agree, but they all categorized as open source community platform. In other words, they are closely related options and not diverse enough. I suppose there are other categories out there that I'm not aware of. Still reasearching though.

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liftoffstudios profile image
Liftoff Studios

But isn't that what you want? Ofc you could go with the paid and corporate ones too but I'm not to judge

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hunghvu profile image
Hung Vu

Maybe, maybe not, that's why I'm gathering more information to make an informed decision. On a surface, the community platform like Forem won many check boxes, but there might be more suitable solutions out there.

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liftoffstudios profile image
Liftoff Studios

I get your point, I'm just not informed enough to suggest more platforms ¯_(ツ)_/¯