Feature request: Link preview only in body of embedded posts
I have a specific use scenario I can’t seem to solve in Discourse while I’m evaluation the platform. It seems like several other people are trying to accomplish the same thing as me.
I have the embedding feature working well and new “case” pages for my site create a forum post and add replies to my original site. The problems is the content of the forum post that is embedded. My original source site is React and I can’t seem to control what content to display through RSS.
What works perfectly is, if I post a url to the original source page, Discourse creates a beautiful preview of the page and links to it. How can I use that link preview as the content of my post?
It would be amazing if there was an Embed option to only post the link preview. I don’t need the actual content from the page included in my forum post. I just want conversational replies and users to get back to the source page if they need the content.
This won’t solve your problem, but this is something that a few sites that publish WordPress posts to Discourse with the WP Discourse plugin wanted to accomplish. For that case, the WordPress plugin was able to provide a workaround.
To allow this to work with posts created with the Javascript embed code would require a new feature to be added to the core Discourse code. It might be a very useful feature for sites that struggle to get their external posts accurately displayed in Discourse topics.
It’s not my job anymore, but having helped sites configure this in the past, having a fallback to display a onebox link when an accurate representation of the post can’t be returned would sure have been appreciated. I think it’s a good feature request for the core Discourse code.
It could be accomplished with a plugin now if your site’s self-hosted.