How would you migrate the wordpress.org forum to Discourse?

The wordpress.org support forum is a high-traffic, high-volume forum, with probably hundreds of new posts a day.

It's got three particularly interesting categories:

• Plugins & Hacks - Embedded example
• Themes & Templates - Embedded example
• Reviews - Embedded example-1, example-2

These are special because they're not primarily accessed via the forum/category index. Instead, they're accessed via distributed embeds, sectioned off by tags.

In other words, no one's gonna be writing their support request for Co Authors Plus in the Plugins & Hacks forum. They'll do it via the plugin's dedicated support forum, which automatically adds the 'co-authors-plus' tag needed for a post to show up in that embedded forum. (This also adds the handy benefit of being able to cross-post between two plugins in the occasional case when a post relates to both.)

It works the same way for themes. I'm not quite sure how it works for reviews but the post-flow is the same.

Another similar example is Vanilla Forum plugins.

Hypothetically speaking, say you were asked to convert the entire WP Support forum to Discourse. How would you do it?

I would create separate discourse frontends for each dedicated forum that points to a shared database, but filters on posts based on the topic tags. The main discourse instance would show all the topics, including the three interesting categories, but those would be un-editable (or however they are set up in the support forum). The secondary discourse instances would share the same user-logins, but would only point to the specific categories and have the automations applied to implicitly add those tags.

This is on the hypothetical assumption that we could write a front-end wrapper to adapt and filter the normal discourse connections. I believe in the end its all json coming out of the api, so it might be possible with a bit of piping and a process acting as the filtering middleman.

Thanks for chiming in, sorry for not keeping the discussion alive.

Are you talking about Multisite or would this be something different?

Which tags? Discourse (unfortunately imo) has no plans to support tags out of the box.

I still don't see an elegant solution to this. You either:

1. Create a parent category that holds a plethora of sub-categories, or
2. You create a multisite with a plethora of parent categories.

It's possible there could be a tagging plugin that works in tandem with the existing category structures. Then you have additional "levels" to work with that are more ad-hoc.

Update: Thanks to the new Tagger plugin from @lightyear, this migration could probably be achieved by properly migrating the tags.