Archive, organize and share the information by installing the Knowledge explorer plugin at Discourse. Discourse as KB is useful and offers rich search options.

Discourse

Overview

In this fast-expanding digital world, it is highly important to have a two-sided interaction with end-users. Therefore, all the successful businesses always have installed a discussion forum for various reasons such as analyzing the target audience, provide technical support, collecting feedback, improve the products, and many more. However, anyone can create a topic and all the discussion happens openly in a public mode.

In this blog post, we will cover the following points:

How Discourse as a knowledge base works?

Knowledge base act as a database of documents and information. It is used to collect, manage, and share the information relevant to the company’s products and procedures. When we talk about a discussion forum like Discourse, there are long threaded topics where the end-users and representatives participate in a debate. In this case, customers find it hard to find relevant information. To coup this hassle, the Discourse community has developed a couple of knowledge base plugins.

Having KB plugin installed at Discourse becomes quite fast for customers to find the desired information. In addition, there are several customer queries and questions that remain unanswered for quite a long time. Hence, documenting commonly used information in KB style topics saves time and improves customer experience.

Setting up Knowledge explorer plugin at Discourse

In this section, we will see how to enable the knowledge explorer plugin and what it does offer.

As Discourse is a completely open source, the Knowledge explorer plugin is available at Github.

There are easy steps to install any plugin at Discourse. Therefore, follow the instructions mentioned in this plugin installation guide.

After installing the plugin, enable the plugin by turning on the knowledge explorer enabled setting. You can add categories and tags to the knowledge explorer tags settings.

You can find the knowledge explorer plugin from the top-right menu as shown in the image below

Discourse as KB

Now, you can see the knowledge base stye list of topics as shown in the image

Discourse as KB

Moreover, you can search for any topic from the search bar hanging up at the top. It lets you search by tags and categories as well as you can perform a global search too.

Discourse as KB

Finally, you can open and share the link of the document with anyone.

Discourse as KB

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen how Discourse can be used as a knowledge base for a business. It is truly important to have a strong eye on the needs of end-users. As far as the forum is concerned, we should take it to the next level by equipping it with the KB plugin so that customers can approach required resources easily and quickly.

containerize.com has enlisted many powerful forum software in Discussion Forum category. For regular updates, please stay connected with blog.containerize.com.