Hi folks, I’m in the process of evaluating whether we should adopt Discourse for our organization. I’m working with a group at UC Santa Cruz that is developing a social network for cancer researchers, and we’d like to replace our existing forums with something better. At the same time, we’ve got a lot of special needs, and we’re actively researching new ideas for scientific collaboration. I’m not going to give the complete list of requirements, but I want to ask about a few basic things. One interested in is being able to integrate Discourse with the other applications we have. For example, in our existing applications a “collaboration” object represents a research team that is focused on some project, and new collaborations are formed on a regular basis. Each collaboration should have their own private forum, but some postings would be sent to multiple collaborations. So the first question I would pose is what kind of Discourse object a collaboration should map to - a category, or something else? Second question is how to create that object - I was thinking that there might be some kind of RESTful API so that our server could tell Discourse to create it when a new collaboration was created. Another question has to do with reputation and ranking. In the scientific world, reputation is gained through citations - the more people that reference your paper, the better off you are. So in a scientifically-oriented forum, reputation would be gained via quoting and resharing - that is, it counts the number of times people reference your words. Is something like this feasible? I see that Discourse already supports embedding of SVGs, which is great - a lot of our researchers share experimental results in the form of SVGs (scatter plots, trend graphs, etc.) We’re also interested in more interactive kinds of embeds - for example, we have a kind of embeddable object that represents a data set, such as the results of clinical trials, and this takes you to a page where you can slice and dice the data in different ways, form hypotheses and try them out by graphing the data in different ways. In the long run, something we’re very interested in is the creation of curated digests - that is, some sort of tool that would allow someone to grab excepts and quotes from a lot of different threads and create a publishable artifact, a summary of the outcomes of those discussions. And of course, this artifact would retain links to the original discussion, so that it’s easy to determine who originally contributed a particular idea. It seems to me that this might align with some of your goals as well, since you are interested in creating “civilized discussion” - being able to create an abstract of a conversation seems like it would fit right in.

Embedding Discourse into your other apps is pretty easy. See [image] Embed Discourse comments on another website via Javascript Integrations Discourse has the ability to embed the comments from a topic in a remote site using a Javascript API that creates an IFRAME. For an example of this in action, check out Coding Horror’s blog. The blog is run via Ghost but the comments are embedded from his Discourse forum. One important thing to note with this setup is that users have to navigate to your forum to post replies. This is intentional, as we feel that the posting interface on a Discourse forum is currently much richer than what we … [image] Talin: some sort of tool that would allow someone to grab excepts and quotes from a lot of different threads and create a publishable artifact, Discourse does this out of the box. Here’s a snippet from the Emed page. You can click below and it’ll expand, or take you the thread in context. [image]Embed Discourse comments on another website via Javascript How it works In Discourse, a topic is made up of many posts. When you are embedding Discourse on another site, you are linking a document (blog entry, HTML page, etc.) with a single topic. When people post in that topic, their comments will automatically show up on the page you embedded it in.

Hey, thanks for the quick reply. I didn’t realize you could quote from other threads, that looks very promising. I don’t think we actually want to “embed” Discourse into another site - rather, Discourse would be a full, top-level sibling along with a bunch of other separate apps (most of which are written in Meteor/JS with a MongoDB backend), with some minimal amount of integration between them. I’m thinking of something along these lines: Users can belong to one or more collaborations (or “group” if you prefer). Each collaboration can have multiple topics. Members of a collaboration can view existing topics or create new ones. Topics can be sent to more than one collaboration as well as to private individuals. So that data model is a bit different than what you were describing.

It took me a while to wrap my head around Discourse’s organization and how to coerce it into something that I could use to teach classes. [image] Talin: Users can belong to one or more collaborations (or “group” if you prefer). Discourse calls groups of topics (top level posts) “categories”. “groups” are groups of people. Groups can be used to limit permissions on categories. [image] Talin: Each collaboration can have multiple topics. Each category can have many topics. No problem. [image] Talin: Members of a collaboration can view existing topics or create new ones. The permissions system handles this. You can also create categories where some people can only view (they can reply, but it has to become a new topic in adifferent category), or only view and reply to topics in the category. [image] Talin: Topics can be sent to more than one collaboration as well as to private individuals. You’d need to find a creative solution here. Topics exist in only one category. You can move things between categories. You can also use tags as an organizer. Users can watch tags. People can invite people to join or notice a discussion with @username.

Thanks for the responses so far, they have been very helpful. I see that the Discourse API allows the creation of groups. Does it also allow the setting of group membership? Basically what I’d want to do is have all of the membership be managed by my application external to Discourse, and then use API calls to tell Discourse which users are in which groups.

[image] Talin: Discourse API allows the creation of groups. Does it also allow the setting of group membership? [image]Reverse engineer the Discourse API Discourse is backed by a complete JSON api. Anything you can do on the site you can also do using the JSON api. See: [image] Reverse engineer the Discourse API Integrations Discourse is backed by a complete JSON api. Anything you can do on the site you can also do using the JSON api. The API is documented at docs.discourse.org. You can also use the discourse_api Ruby gem as a client library. However, not every endpoint is documented. To determine how to do something with the JSON API here are some steps you can follow. Example: recategorize a topic. Go to a topic and start editing a category: [image] Open Chrome dev tools, switch to the Network tab, select …

Integrating Discourse with a larger social network app?

Development

DeanMarkTaylor (Dean Taylor) February 4, 2016, 8:32pm 6

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Integrating Discourse with a larger social network app?

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