Get Answers on the Go with DiscourseHub
Eric Cloninger
Sr. Technical Program Manager
Hello Everyone! It's a quiet week here at Samsung Developer Central, and many of our developer advocates are enjoying a few days of summer vacation. I typically work behind the scenes, creating features of the Samsung Developers site and supporting the efforts of everyone else. Since nobody is looking, I thought I'd step out from behind the curtain and share a few secrets of our site(s) with you.
Let's Get Talking
Back in January, we made several big changes to our site and the way we work with third-party developers. One of those changes is the forums where we interact with our developer communities. The new Samsung Developer forums use the popular Discourse project, and we're very excited to be working with them.
The wonderful thing about Discourse is it's built on a modern framework so it looks great on my 32 inch (80cm) monitor, and yet it's completely usable on a mobile phone or tablet. Nearly every operation of Discourse occurs using an API, so there are many ways to work with the site as a result.
On The Road Again
Even though they may be on vacation, our developer advocates can still keep up with their favorite user communities using the DiscourseHub mobile app. You can as well--installation is quick, and setup is relatively painless.
Once the app is installed, simply click the "Add your first site" button and enter https://forum.developer.samsung.com in the search box.
When the site appears, click the "connect" button.
Next, you'll be prompted to log into your Samsung Account. As with the Samsung Developers site, the forums use Samsung Account to authenticate you.
After logging in, you'll need to authorize your mobile device to access your Samsung Developer forums account.
Once you've logged in and authorized your device, you can browse, view, and respond to forum posts from the comfort of your beach chair.
Feed Me, Please
Like many of you, I'm a gadget enthusiast. Cameras, audio gear, things that go fast, and mobile devices to name a few. I read a lot of tech sites and keep up with the latest issues involving site security. I prefer to browse and read all these sites with the same experience rather than jumping from site to site.
This is where RSS plays a major role in my daily existence. Every morning, I spend 20-30 minutes catching up on the news and activities on the sites I manage using one of the popular mobile/web RSS readers. Discourse built RSS support into their platform, so it's simple to add alerts on the content you want to see.
For example, if I want to follow all the latest topics that are being discussed in the Mobile category, I simply need to take the URL for the page and append .rss to it. Instead of browsing to https://forum.developer.samsung.com/c/mobile/12, I put https://forum.developer.samsung.com/c/mobile/12.rss into my RSS reader, and Voila!
Similarly, if there's a person whose advice is always useful, you can follow them in RSS as well. I'll pick on John Shih, who is one of our award-winning Galaxy Theme creators. His handle on the developer forums is X9_Studio. To follow his account, I'd go to the activity tab of his profile and append .rss. Now, I can see in my RSS viewer any time he's giving out great advice.
We 💙 Feedback
Communities are about the people, and we love to hear what our community has to say. Do you use Discourse for your hobbies or other technical communities? Is there some feature you'd like to see? Hop into the Feature Requests section and let me know. There are several upgrades that I'm planning to make to the forums in the next few months, so come back often and check out the progress.
Thank you for being part of Samsung Developers. Stay safe out there!
