Hey @yanokwa thanks for your feedback, as well as that from @W_Brunette & @Jeff_Beorse. One specific thing I wanted to respond about, as I've been doing some work on this for another project:
One consideration would be to use the blog section (yes, it's currently called "Blog Archive") to post news alerts, but -- and this is where it'd be different -- it can be linked to the Discourse forum for comments and follow-up. A potential workflow for this might be:
- Create a "blog post" static page & deploy it to the site. Include the Discourse JS comments code at the bottom of the post.
- Load the deployed page in the browser, which would create a "mirror" post on the forum, in a category to-be-specified, such as Announcements.
- If folks wanted to reply to the news with comments, the top comments from each news item (topic on Discourse) would be rendered at the bottom of the page.
See https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-serve-man-with-software/ for an example. This above scenario presumes that you are interested in people responding to and/or interacting with the news item(s). Also it of course would require appropriate permissions on the Discourse category.
Another alternative is to work on embedding an RSS feed of a Discourse category (or the entire forum!) on the web site. This is a little bit more complex as it'd require parsing of the RSS feed(s) but if you just want to point people to "the latest news" it might be the way to go.