openHAB now has its own fully fledged discussion forum!

How would new users know that? I didnt even know until just now.

i would have hoped that you’ve received a welcome email (after you’ve created your account) which should have explained such features for you. Did you receive it? Do you remember?

I did, but it did not tell anything about that specific page, but you know what? Just forget it.

It is starting to become pretty clear, that this is perfect in any way, as it is right now. If people does not know about every little function there is, and find it annoying to look through long lists of things which can grow at any given moment, it is them not being good enough.

I am never going to know all functions in every single system made, I am never going to sit down and read the entire documentation from end go end for all the systems either, and I am not going to read them over and over and over, in case I forgot something. And I am not going to do things in a more difficult way than necessary.

Ok I see the field now. There are 2 fields to set tags.

I just wanted to say I was pretty excited to see a real forum created here. I thought the previous groups were unapproachable and very difficult to sift through and engage in so it was a deterrent for me getting started, but now I can see the community as so much connectable. Connecting people like this is a great way to bolster community efforts so I am excited to see them grow!

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I love Discourse, also from other projects. It’s a great platform to discuss projects like openhab.

Two ideas for improvement:

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Didn’t know that plugin before ,thanks! Installed and see it working already.

do you know of any plugin to support such highlighting features? Since the configuration file DSL’s are somewhat deprecated (as they are merely replaced by XML and JSON in OH2/ESH) it would be great to have syntax highlighting for the formats as well.

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Hey that’s great. Just tested myself and this is really handy :wink:
Did you also activate the badges? “Gotta catch 'em all!” :smiley:

About the syntax highlighting: This seems promising: https://meta.discourse.org/t/adding-additional-languages-to-highlight-js-used-by-discourse/22925

XML and JSON are already supported by Discourse code blocks. Maybe it’s more important to have the right set of buttons in the editor (not all users will know about tripple-back-tick -as we can see in every other thread- and even if they do, they still need the right syntax identifier). Right now there is only the preformatted text button, which is not this useful. It seems like one can add buttons like that: https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-do-i-add-toolbar-icons-to-the-editor/24612/6

How about a few openHAB specific buttons for different code blocks!?

For the record, i think these are okayish right now:

  • bash for shell commands
  • csv for items
  • php for sitemaps (not really fitting but at least consistent)
  • php for rules

Best! Thomas

sounds great but to be honest i will not find the time experiment with such things in the next weeks (will change jobs). Any chance for you to have a look into this things?

Hey, quick update. I am willing to do that and already found the right approach. I will have time for that earliest after next week. Do you agree with my “workaround” good-match-languages or are there even better syntax highlightings for items, rules etc? My idea would be to 1st add editor buttons and after that 2nd add new OH(2) specific languages for code blocks. Updating the buttons would be easy at this point.

yes, i would agree. Could you come up with a proposal? I will try to add this to the forum then. Do you happen to know if these changes are persistent and thus agnostic about forum updates (which occur very frequently)?

Hey teichsta,
I finally had some spare/distraction time and followed up on the idea. The result is a full-grown discourse plugin (I really should have done more important things :sweat_smile:), so no worries about updates I guess :wink:


I tested everything in a fresh virtual machine installation. As this is a plugin, not much can go wrong. The plugin only touches the composer toolbar and to make it a bit more general, I provided some plugin settings for you to tune. If there are any last minute ideas, just contact me :wink:

@teichsta This sounds useful, did you already try to integrate it?

Sure hope so ^^
There is not much to try. It has been pretty stable for me and by now was tested by others in the Discourse community. It’s a plugin you can just install. If there are any problems or imperfections, just contact me.

Thanks @ThomDietrich!

Not wanting to make you wait any longer for Thomas, I have just installed the plugin myself, it is active now :slight_smile:

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thanks @Kai and @ThomDietrich for being so patient 


Thanks for this contribution. Would it not be better to use the default syntax highlighter instead of CSV and PHP highlighters, since they are not correct?

Hey @Kai, thanks! I’m glad everything is working. The 4th and 5th options are in there to address communities outside of openHAB. Are you sure we need them here?

@watou, you are totally right that using csv and php is a simple hack and not the ideal solution. The plugin only solves halve the problem, the other halve would be to define our own syntax highlighting, I linked something related to that in the thread. What do you mean by “default”? I tested a typical items file and rule file with different syntax highlightings available and found those the not-perfect-but-best-suited ones :wink: If you find others better fitting I can exchange them in the plugin. Would be better if someone would take up the task to implement a basic highlighting for openhab.

Further discussion over here? Discourse plugin for openHAB Community

I believe we have a happy birthday for the forum.:birthday::birthday::gift:

It is a much better environment than the Google ones. Thanks to all that made this possible!

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