I am building something community oriented and Discourse looks perfect for it. But my eventual plan is to port the community to a custom app later. Curious if anyone has done it before and how hard/easy would it be to do so. Don’t want to lock into the ecosystem.

That would largely be a data migration like any other. The tables are pretty self-explanatory? Or you could just do everything via the API and build your own front end, keeping the Discourse database structure and back end …

It depends on what “port the community to a custom app later” means. If you want to migrate away from Discourse to a custom-made database+backend+frontend+etc, a data migration is the way. If you want to keep using the data and backend layers of Discourse, using it as a headless service and writin…

[image] Renato Atilio: If you want to keep using the data and backend layers of Discourse, using it as a headless service and writing a new frontend consuming the existing APIs, that’s also possible and has been done before. Thanks so much for your reply. Do you have any examples / case studi…

[image] Lexicon: a customizable native mobile app for your Discourse site extras Hey everyone, I wanted to quickly drop in here and mention that I’ve just open-sourced a project called Lexicon with some colleagues of mine. It’s a pre-built, customizable native mobile app…

This is fantastic! Thank you so much for sharing these. I’ve been browsing some discussions on people trying to build a full-blown social-network on discourse. If you have any examples of those, do let me know. I haven’t yet come across a serious implementation of discourse on the web that doesn’t …

Also consider Federation and take a look at: [image] Federation support for Discourse Feature The mail goal of this feature is to connect all the Discourse communities like how Mastodon makes use of global and local feeds to maintain a healthy and decentralize…

Well said. I’d also add the enormous non-technical challenges of gaining traction, attracting users, getting the word about, marketing … feature set - what are you offering which gives people something they can’t get from the mainstream apps? Oh and finance … time … At least forums can fit into s…

Thanks for the reply. Really appreciate taking time. Precisely to de-risk non-technical challenges, I want to go with Discourse.

I didn’t know there was a proposal for federation—that would be quite cool. Thanks for sharing.

Hi Paras, Can you share some of your findings please? Do you have any clue about how difficult it is to develop simple and medium complexity features? I guess the developers need to have experience with the stack. But then they need to figure out the workings of the platform and then start puzzling…

How easy is it to port Discourse community to custom webapp later?

Development

merefield (Robert) March 9, 2023, 9:36am 5

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How easy is it to port Discourse community to custom webapp later?

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