You could use WordPress, or some other platform, to create the blog pages. The blog part of the site would load faster and be easier to maintain than a plugin that customizes Discourse. Something like this would be fairly easy to do with the wp-discourse plugin. You could get the ‘Recent forum activity’ for the sidebar by making an API call to Discourse. The only downside I can see to doing it this way would be that you couldn’t use the Discourse header on the blog part of the site.
Hey @simon thanks for the inspiration. I was also thinking about a wordpress installation but I didn’t knew that there is a Plugin for Discourse. Maybe we will choose this option.
I contacted them directly and they are considering to share their work back to the community. There are a few business concerns they need to evaluate before they are ready to go for it, so let’s wait and see.
[quote=“ljpp, post:7, topic:48496”]
they are considering to share their work back to the community
[/quote]That is great to hear! Any chance they mentioned how long before we’ll have an answer?
Actually I think they’re using their own plugin and/or forked version of Discourse. Pretty cool customization! Note that the pieces in the news stream on the front page are not topics. They have created their own route /news/{id}, with it’s own type of object, a ‘News’ object.
You can achieve a similar ‘media stream’ effect with Topic List Previews. However, note that Topic Previews are for topics. Also, if you want an sidebar like that you’ll need to override a template.
You won’t be able to achieve the exact Elektronauts experience without some relatively substantive work on a new plugin. Or you could ask them to take a peek at their code