Hi folks,
We are relatively new to discourse dev, so this might be off. We couldn’t find an exact answer to this in our searches.
We are developing a web site with various types of content. As part of this, we want to have threaded comment streams for items uploaded by our users. So, just for example, assume a user uploads content about their car, - the content will be on our site, and there’ll be an optional discussion/comment stream on that item, allowing engagement by other users.
We have Discourse installed and running, with SSO and all. We embed a related Discourse comment within an iframe. We get the top comment, and the well-known button “Continue Discussion” which takes us out of the site and into the Discourse server.
Is there anything we can do to have an entire threaded discussion, starting with the top comment, inside our iframe (or otherwise inside our pages)? So that users can continue a the discussion inside the uploaded content page. Is this even doable with Discourse?
I have similar goals, I have a web site with various types of content and I self host a Discourse instance so I can have a forum for interacting with users and building a community. I also wanted to embed parts of Discourse into my other site. The standard method Discourse provides is really easy and looked cool but wasn’t quite what I desired.
The first problem is that if someone wants to comment, they have to login to Discourse (or you must allow anonymous comments and that leads to other problems/complexities) There seems to be some ongoing debate here on meta as to if Discourse should try to accommodate better interaction with CMS (content management systems) or introduce features to make it more of a CMS itself.
Plenty of folks use Discourse for blogs, marketplace/e-store, e-magazine, video/picture gallery and so on.
My first strategy for embedding parts of Discourse into my website was to customize the look of my forum as best I could, first starting out, then mimic the style on my other site. The idea is to blend the two together so a user does really notice the content is coming from two different servers. Discourse actually provides tons of ways to tailor the look of the interface that even non-techie folks can handle.
Once I got to know Discourse a little better I figured out a few methods for embedding cool chunks of discourse into my other site
I’m still learning and have some more ideas but also have looked a Wordpress and Ghost
Thanks for your comments!
We went through similar thought processes and experiments.
What we ended up doing (well, still working on it so jury’s out re quality of final result) is ditch the web embedding direction altogether and use the Discourse API to include full Discourse discussions inside our pages. This allows us to shape it exactly like we want, look-n-feel wise and much more. More work, absolutely, but it appears as if the final result is going to be worth it.
As described in that post, my other server has PHP backend. I got the API working using cURL then this really cool website to convert my working cURL to a PHP module which the website can call using javascript ajax calls.
Here is my upcoming events calendar on my discourse instance
