I have similar goals, I have a web site with various types of content and I self host a Discourse instance so I can have a forum for interacting with users and building a community. I also wanted to embed parts of Discourse into my other site. The standard method Discourse provides is really easy and looked cool but wasn’t quite what I desired.
The first problem is that if someone wants to comment, they have to login to Discourse (or you must allow anonymous comments and that leads to other problems/complexities) There seems to be some ongoing debate here on meta as to if Discourse should try to accommodate better interaction with CMS (content management systems) or introduce features to make it more of a CMS itself.
Plenty of folks use Discourse for blogs, marketplace/e-store, e-magazine, video/picture gallery and so on.
My first strategy for embedding parts of Discourse into my website was to customize the look of my forum as best I could, first starting out, then mimic the style on my other site. The idea is to blend the two together so a user does really notice the content is coming from two different servers. Discourse actually provides tons of ways to tailor the look of the interface that even non-techie folks can handle.
Once I got to know Discourse a little better I figured out a few methods for embedding cool chunks of discourse into my other site
I’m still learning and have some more ideas but also have looked a Wordpress and Ghost