So, since that is already possible right now (not only with nextcloud), your “integration” would be to have an SSO between the two? That should also be possible already.
For me, the most important aspect of integration would be how those links to nextcloud documents are rendered in discourse. That could be anything from improved (possibly customizable) oneboxing to full viewing capabilities (within post or in a modal) to full editing capabilities to the possibility of using discourse to annotate and discuss documents (i.e. to be able to quote/refer to parts of a nextcloud document in discourse…
I don’t think Nextcloud can handle document editing or annotation; they use extensions and plugins for that. You have to enable a pdf viewer plugin and you’d need Collabora or Onlyoffice to edit and annotate documents. Discourse/NodeBB likewise aren’t really built for document editing AFAIK.
Yours sound like great integration ideas, but integration to me is allowing for better file sharing and document management in Discourse/NodeBB. So a solid SSO integration is the first step for us. If the developer can go further and get some sort of onebox or embeds in that would be pretty sweet. I’d love to be able to type @ or some other key and have a dropdown search of our nextcloud files for easy referencing; or reroute drag and drop uploads from a forum post to upload directly to a nextcloud folder. Wasn’t really thinking about it from a document editor perspective.
Syncing Nextcloud file comment feature with a forum post when it’s tagged would also be nice, but I don’t know where the post would go if it was commented on in Nextcloud and not the forum. Maybe a one way sync.
Regardless; no just SSO that’s already possible but we don’t know how to do ourselves. We haven’t started development yet though and I haven’t seen many SSO implementations so maybe it’s something that could be built without too much work.
I’m not an admin. I just signed up to see if Discourse can suit my needs. You’re saying I would need to add an extension, and then I could upload documents beyond images and simple text?
Yes. if you’re looking for more structured document management beyond attaching directly to posts then I would suggest looking at other options. Files can be attached to posts but there’s no central file management.