Craziest Discourse Modifications

Hello :wave:

I am incredibly curious to discover the most extraordinary modifications you have managed to achieve with your Discourse platform. I know that many individuals use the default themes, plugins but I am sure their are lot of other platforms use a completely unique modifications too. I am eager to witness these creations. :slightly_smiling_face:

Is your Discourse platform unique in any way? If you would like to, please introduce your site on this topic. :slightly_smiling_face: By doing so, it is plausible that an entirely new view will unfold before us, showcasing the remarkable flexibility of Discourse and the astounding levels of customization it can achieve.

This topic is not made for questions like… Ask to share the customization source or code. It is just to see many things possible and maybe we can get some idea… Anyway, if the author/creator would like to share their modifications, they can in theme, theme-component or plugin categories.

Thanks :slightly_smiling_face:

20 Likes

Hey Don,

Great topic! :smile:

We have been developing quite a lot of custom Discourse plugins along with our WordPress services.

A couple of customizations:

Update Requests

Customers on our main website will automatically be able to request new updates for WordPress themes and plugins using a custom Discourse plugin.

https://streamable.com/bmskfl

Posting replies from WordPress to Discourse
When a customer has a question or does like to report a theme or plugin, he can do that directly using this feature.

https://streamable.com/avqdtn

Upgrading members to a custom group if they use WooCommerce product + license

We have WooCommerce as a shop component activate on our WordPress systems. Whenever a customer purchases a license, or order, he will automatically be granted to a specific user level on Discourse so he can access the support community.

And some other minor integrations:

  • Automatically follow a Discourse topic by downloading a theme or plugin.
  • Auto-sync users upon registration from WordPress to Discourse.
  • And we use make.com to automate several other tasks.

Just my 2 cents and I’m looking forward to other integrations :smiley:

6 Likes

I modified the signature plugin to let people specify a set of their favourite Pokémon to show below their post (this is a Pokémon based forum). I also added a badge system that awards users a bage when they get above a certain post count. That is shown below the username. There is also a plugin that let’s people share their Instagram/YouTube/ebay account next to their name. Nothing too crazy.



A crazier one was this discord plugin I made that links accounts across Discourse/Discord. It stores all messages in the discourse db so you can quickly query total Discord post count (which is not a feature you can do easily otherwise believe it ir not). Based on post count, you can collect a badge on the forum (and it also gives you that rank using the discord bot api). You can also view your Discord posts on Discourse because why not

10 Likes

Not a very good example of what you can do with discourse…
but you can put whatever theme you want on. This may be crazy, because broken = crazy right?

3 Likes

I created a dashboard that will let you install Discourse:

You can enter your hostname and API keys for Mailgun and Digital Ocean and click a button to install:

The script creates a droplet, configures mailgun, and sends you an email with the required DNS settings. When you have made them, it installs Discourse and sends an email when it’s complete.

A site that’s set up looks like this:

image

You can also manage plugins and environment settings:

If you join the free trial group, you can check it out for free.

16 Likes

At Backbase we used a heavily modified Discourse instance that served all of our product docs (rendered out of Asciidoc and Docbook).
About 1.5M documents, fully embedded in the Discourse ember framework. We had a custom Algolia search that included it all.

And we developed something using the gamification/badging to emulate Salesforce Trails.

Alas it was a closed community, so I don’t have a lot of visuals to share :frowning:
Made a post years ago with some screenshots:

9 Likes

Mind sharing this modified plugin and how you did the last part of your reply here? Would love to use it as a base to modify to my own needs.

1 Like