Product Concepts And Terminology
DiscussionBridge connects publishing systems with Discourse while preserving authority, provenance, native presentation, and recoverable operations.
Current releases and live environments are documented in Versions And Live Status. Installation behavior belongs in the Alpha Installation and Operator Guide and each component’s README. This page explains the product model and shared language; it is not release evidence or an implementation checklist.
Mission
Section titled “Mission”Between people and institutions.
Communities and their knowledge.
Published information and living discussion.
Local autonomy and broader coordination.
Systems that should cooperate but no longer do.
Discussion Bridge is simply that mission made concrete in software.
The historical source wording is preserved in
DiscussionBridge Mission Source Evidence.
Current product styling is DiscussionBridge.
Product Model
Section titled “Product Model”DiscussionBridge is a Discourse-centered, adapter-driven publication and discussion system.
- DiscussionBridge for Discourse owns Content Connections, Bridge Records, publication policy, authorization, audit, and the cross-platform work queue.
- DiscussionBridge Adapter Protocol defines the shared contract and conformance fixtures. It is not a deployed adapter or control plane.
- Platform components translate that contract into Astro, Ghost, Hugo, Statamic, and WordPress-native content, routes, rendering, persistence, build, deployment, and recovery behavior.
The detailed boundary lives in Core/Adapter Architecture. How each adapter creates, updates, withdraws, retries, and recovers a publication is documented in Adapter Operating Models.
Naming
Section titled “Naming”Use these names consistently:
- DiscussionBridge — the product family.
- DiscussionBridge for Discourse — the Discourse plugin and receiver.
- DiscussionBridge for Astro, Ghost, Hugo, Statamic, or WordPress — the focused platform component.
- DiscussionBridge Adapter Protocol — the shared contract.
- The Bridge — only the dedicated public demonstration at
bridge.demo.discussionbridge.dev, never the generic plugin name.
Use a platform’s native package term where useful: plugin for Discourse and WordPress, addon for Statamic, and adapter as the family-wide generic term.
Publication Directions
Section titled “Publication Directions”- To Discourse means a publishing platform owns the article or page and connects it to a Discourse topic.
- From Discourse means an authorized Discourse topic is materialized as native content on a connected publishing platform.
Direction is an authority decision, not merely a transport direction. A page can present discussion without granting either side permission to overwrite the other’s source.
Single-Writer Ownership
Section titled “Single-Writer Ownership”Each connected resource has one declared source of truth for the fields under management. The source may be the publishing platform or Discourse, but it must not be both at once.
DiscussionBridge preserves source identity, destination identity, revision and mapping state, policy, and sanitized failure information. Exact retries reuse that durable state. A failed retry must not silently create another topic or native page.
Connections, Records, And Work
Section titled “Connections, Records, And Work”- A Content Connection identifies one authorized relationship between DiscussionBridge for Discourse and a publishing platform installation.
- A Bridge Record preserves the durable relationship between a Discourse topic and an external resource.
- A publication work item represents bounded work for one destination and revision. Its lease, acknowledgement, retry, and recovery rules prevent unbounded or duplicate processing.
Credentials authorize operations but are not publication identities. Public documentation and support reports should use non-secret connection and record identifiers, never keys or tokens.
Native Outcomes
Section titled “Native Outcomes”An adapter should create the platform’s real content object rather than a generic foreign page. That means native entries, posts, pages, routes, permalinks, revision behavior, visibility, and deployment semantics remain meaningful to that platform’s operator.
Platform differences are intentional. Ghost drafts, Hugo files, Statamic Flat, DB, and SSG profiles, WordPress posts, and Astro content entries do not need the same internal implementation to honor the same DiscussionBridge contract.
Presentation Modes
Section titled “Presentation Modes”Simple, Full, and Interactive describe the reader’s discussion experience. They do not change source ownership or silently authorize publication. See Presentation Modes for rendering, authentication, availability, and rich-content boundaries.
Product Maturity
Section titled “Product Maturity”DiscussionBridge is Alpha software. Component releases may advance independently on the same compatibility line. A tagged component release, a successful installation, a reachable demo, and product-family acceptance are different facts.
Planned work is labeled in the Draft Roadmap. It is not current product behavior until the owning component documents and releases it.
Product Principle
Section titled “Product Principle”Your discussions deserve freedom. The publishing platform, forum, adapter, hosting model, and presentation may change without making an accidental URL or proprietary CMS database the only possible home of the discussion.