I am contemplating on replacing proprietary commenting system for fastestlaps.com with discourse.
Site has different kinds of content pages which have to be comment-able - car pages, laptime pages, article pages, even highly dynamic comparison pages.
I would like to use discourse javascript embedding for comments on these pages, in such a way that each type of page creates a thread in it’s corresponding discourse forum category, as soon as the first commenter leaves a comment.
The threads would also have to have generic topic names.
For example:
- First post in a carpage creates a topic in forum cat “Carpage
comments” with a generic name “Ferrari ABC comments”. - First post in an article page creates a topic in forum cat
“Article comments” with a generic name “This is a nice article
title etc”
I would also need a widget for latest posts and threads with links to actual pages (carpages, article pages etc) or “native” discourse forum topics (to community.fastestlaps.com) if those threads/posts do not belong to a fastestlaps page.
The widget data I supposed I could try to fetch via some kind of json-ish discourse api (if such exists). Determining the links for each post would be the bigger issue.
Comment areas themselves I would like to generate with disqus-like javascript embed, I assume discourse has it. The issue here is that I would need to specify in that embed code the thread name and category, if that’s even possible.
Also, if discourse associates embedded threads only with embed (master) page URL, what would happen if the master page URL changes?
So, is the described application possible, without hacking the discourse core?
Having a separate system take care of the community/discussion aspect of the page would reduce complexity and let me concentrate on the features that are actually unique to the page.
I also plan to replace my own blogging solution with wordpress, which is very doable via wordpress json API plugin. So, ideally, the site would be three separate services - core site + wordpress or blog + discourse for community/user management.
If discourse was usable in this way - as a very adaptable “community system for a website”, it would greatly increase it’s adoption - I bet I am not the only one having these same ideas.
So far I haven’t found a system that would meet these requirements.