This month, we hosted a Community Office Hours session exploring Discourse’s new full-page embedded discussion experience.
Watch the replay:
This update makes it possible for visitors to participate in community conversations directly from a website, blog, knowledge base, or other content platform without needing to leave the page.
With full app mode enabled, the complete Discourse discussion experience loads within the embedded section. Visitors can reply, like posts, quote responses, follow links, flag content, and use other familiar Discourse features directly from the page.
A few key takeaways from the session:
- Full app mode replaces the previous read-only embed experience. When it is disabled, visitors can read comments but must open the community to participate.
- The feature works with platforms including Ghost, WordPress, static HTML sites, knowledge bases, and other systems that allow you to add JavaScript.
- New companion topics can be created automatically the first time an embedded page is visited.
- Embedded topics can be routed into a specific Discourse category, making it easier to organize conversations from blogs, product updates, documentation, or other content sources.
- You can keep automatically created topics unlisted until someone replies, which helps prevent large blogs or knowledge bases from flooding the community’s latest topics.
- Teams can use a meta tag to assign the companion topic to the original content author when the website or CMS provides that information.
- Developers can also create topics through the Discourse API and pass the existing topic ID into the embed, giving teams more control over how and when discussions are created.
- Styling inside the embed can be customized through Discourse themes and theme components, including an embed-specific CSS class.
- Allowed hosts and paths can be configured in the Discourse admin settings so the community cannot be embedded on unauthorized websites.
- For the smoothest participation experience, teams should consider SSO or social login options so visitors can authenticate with as little friction as possible.
We’re excited about the possibilities this opens up and look forward to seeing how communities bring conversations directly into the places their audiences already visit.