Recently, together with a friend, we have launched “Rincón Estudiantil Uruguay ”, an online Community for all high school and university students (and volunteer teachers) in the country, thus providing an informative space about Scholarships, Vocations, Careers, etc. using Discourse.
A project started from scratch, by simple pre-university students, with almost no money to invest in the project (We barely cover the server), we work day and night to improve the site, adapt it to students, and of course attract them to the community.
Lately I’ve seen a lot of topics here on Meta about “White-label Discourse App”, and it seemed like a good opportunity since, for some reason in our country they prefer to install apps instead access a website (Yes, we are weird haha )
Having a zero budget, and a government laptop (almost useless, let’s say), I decided to use a no-code platform for this project: Kodular Creator
My reasons: I was already a user (and thanks to my contributions they gifted me a Premium membership)
After spending a few days designing, placing a block here and there, creating a “mini rest api” for the App, I managed to use the Discourse User Api Keys method for the “Reader Mode” of the app (I’ll explain later)
Two “app modes”
WebView Mode
The traditional WebView does not really require much explanation: A small WebView inserted in an App, and that’s it
Reader Mode
This is a custom interface that will be launched with the app, it uses Discourse User Api Keys to obtain the data and display it in a simpler and “direct” interface: Announcements, Scholarships, Messages, Notifications and that’s it
As its name says, the data will only be available to be seen, without any possibility (for the moment ) to interact in another way.
Push Notifications using OneSignal
Kodular offers a Push Notifications component using OneSignal, and I managed to connect it with the Discourse OneSignal plugin so that the user receives notifications in the app (In both modes)
[Wip] Screenshots
Beta on Google Play (Uruguay only)
Read Mode - Announcements
Topic - Read Mode
Notifications (Counter and ListView)
I’m open to questions, and possibly in the future I’ll be able to build Discourse-based apps on demand (Android)
Grateful for the existence of Discourse
#HappyCoding