Discourse not shown in iframe

[AdamM (Adam)]

Thanks for your reply!

Using an <iframe> is very error prone and would make Discourse very hard to use and full of bugs that would be difficult to track down.

Could you share what the specific issues are that would be expected? Or specific reasons why the context of an iframe would cause serious issues?

It also tends to “window” into Discourse which makes things like scrolling through large topics break. Basically, iframes sandboxes a lot of Discourse’s features.

What does “window” mean in this case?

A good route to take if you were considering using an iframe would be to add a header to your forum that matches the rest of your site/app/portal including navigation links. When a user clicks into the forum they will see a similar navigation but would be on a different URL hosted elsewhere. When they click on a non-forum link in the header they’d be back in the site/app/portal.

This is what we will do for our main discussion area, but it is problematic for this specific use case. We are running online courses. Each course happens in a specially themed, private area of our site. The course content includes class materials, videos, schedule, and a discussion area. Once students have completed the course, they can continue the discussions they have started with other participants in the course cohort. They are also added to a general course alumni discussion group, and will also be invited to our larger, public discussion forum.

For our use case, there are two problems with the approach suggested here:

• The theme (header, styles, sidebar, etc) for the course area on our site is not the same as the theme that we will want to use for our Discourse in general. In order to accommodate this, we would need to be able to use different styles and theme content per category, which doesn’t seem to be possible.

• The course discussion in our current (non-Discourse) implementation includes styles, header, and a sidebar menu. It is a low-distraction space where students can focus on the course content and smoothly switch between discussion, class material, videos, etc. As far as I can tell, it would be difficult to modify Discourse to replicate this kind of immersive environment. If this is not the case, I am happy to learn otherwise!

Thanks for your help,
Adam