Can Discourse Support a Shared Forum for Two Websites with Distinct Styling?

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

Multisite won’t work guys,

@Electropoetics

while maintaining a shared user database and topic pool

and this won’t work either

@tvavrda

My guess is that you can run multiple engines (Discourse installations) on top of the same database (so you need a separate database). I would only run 1 sidekiq, though. Otherwise two of them would start fighting for the jobs. Other than that I think Discourse is a stateless app, so it should not matter how many of them you are running

Discourse is not stateless, and all the information is in the database. So if you run multiple instances on top of a single database then they would automatically look the same and changes in one would immediately reflect in the other.

This would “just” be a matter of switching themes. Maybe leverage the existing theme preview logic and have a plugin just look at the hostname instead of the URL parameter.

Hosting the same forum under two URL’s might be the hardest part here, especially with respect to SEO. It would get you into all kinds of duplicate content and canonical URL trouble.