This has been talked about on two other threads already, but they are locked:
Some people say that we should instead work on re-branding Discourse to match design of an existing site.
From experience, this is very difficult to do. Markup and the CSS for that markup are very complicated to work with and not flexible. As an example, the DOM trees between the Discourse header and the main content are very disparate from each other. Injecting header content (In Dicourse’s built-in editor) places injected content very far off from the actual Discourse header, for example.
Believe me, it is quite difficult to simply “make your DIscourse follow you main site theme”.
What I’d like to try next is embedding Discourse in a <iframe>. Let’s see how that goes.
Feature request! It’d be neat if Discourse could be consumed as a set of custom elements. For example:
<!-- ... some custom markup ... -->
<discourse-actions backend="http://url.to/actual/discourse/instance">
<!-- ... some custom markup ... -->
<discourse-main backend="http://url.to/actual/discourse/instance>
which could allow the pieces of Discourse to be embedded anywhere in a site, and the elements would connect to the specified backend.
Visiting http://url.to/actual/discourse/instance directly would open Discourse the normal way as a web application by itself.
Basically this would make Discourse parts usable within overall HTML structures (like Handlebars template partials, but in a future-proof way built on web standards).
Just imagine what else would be possible with such a feature (think about when custom elements have different values for backend attributes)…
