Embed Discourse as a full comment system on your site

Discourse’s embedding system lets you show topic comments on external sites via an iframe — but until now, the experience was read-only. Visitors had to click through to your Discourse site to reply, like, or interact with the discussion.

We’ve added full app mode for embeds, which loads the complete Discourse application inside the iframe. Your visitors can reply, like, quote, and interact with topics without ever leaving your blog or website.

How to enable it

Navigate to Admin > Advanced > Embedding, and you’ll see a new toggle at the top of the page to enable full app mode.

When toggled on:

  • The embed configuration snippet automatically includes the fullApp: true and embedHeight: '800px' parameters
  • The site setting to enable this mode is automatically enabled

The setting is also available under the Embedding > Settings tab as embed_full_app.

What changes for visitors

With full app mode enabled, the embedded iframe loads the full Discourse UI instead of a static list of replies. Visitors on your external site can:

  • Reply to the topic directly
  • Like and quote posts
  • Navigate within the topic as they would on your forum

This gives your blog readers a first-class discussion experience without leaving the page.

Demo

You can see it in action in our blog, in posts like Understanding Discourse Trust Levels , It’s Time We Talked About Tags or Introducing Discourse AI.

16 Likes

this is amazing and a game-changer. well done Team. :discourse: :clap:

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wow, that’s a really nice evolution!! :+1:

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This is awesome! As nice as it is to be able to edit right inside the original page, from my perspective the fact that math is rendered in the embedded version is an even bigger improvement! I look forward to using it on my own site.

In order to try it out, I did navigate to one of the Demo topics that you linked and noticed a few small issues when responding there:

  1. The Markdown/Rich editor toggle did not appear in the editor toolbar,
  2. After posting, I attempted to edit the post at the site and received a warning that the post was being edited in another window, though I had no other window opened in which to edit it, and
  3. I was unable to delete my reply. Evidently, it was deleted by the community.

Overall, though, a huge step - thanks!

We removed that, as well as many, many other UI elements, to simplify the experience on the embed. It should be doable to add that back to your site with a small theme component in the case that you need it.

As with anything new, we are trying to strike a good balance and ended up creating an experience that will make sense for most blogs, but Discourse will always be customizable as you expect it to be.

Interesting, will keep an eye out for this.

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Could this be used to embed within the same discourse?

Ie create a Topic as a blog with companion l(comments) beings seperate topic?

If a visitor has no account will it prompt them to create one?

Combined with new threaded replies would be quite good

Maybe? Not our focus here, so I didn’t test it at all.

Out of scope for this feature.

Yes, it opens a new tab for login.

Yes! We are excited for that to come soon too!

Now if only you could do this with chats :smiley: