Is Discourse a full website or just a forum add-in?

General
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Long story short, I am planning a website that would offer a discourse community and general tabs to provide information.

No matter how hard I search I cannot seem to figure out before starting a 14 day trial if the customization of discourse allows for what I’m looking for.

Cartalk.com is somewhat close to what I want as in a few tabs providing information along with a community or chat tab with discourse.

Is the only thing discourse is providing is the forum function under their “community” tab or the overall theme of that site to include the forum?

I want to make sure I’m not putting the carriage before the horse in terms of having a discourse before the rest of the website if there are no templates in which to build on.

Thanks for all the help.

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No, Discourse is just the forum. There isn’t a seperate website that comes with it on install.

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Thanks so much for the speedy reply. I’m glad I asked as I didn’t want to start the trial and get things going without the rest of the site getting up and going first.

Out of curiosity, is there any website template builders that work well with embedding discourse?

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Wordpress has a plugin to interact with Discourse. Plugin link

You can also embed replies in your website from pages/topics on that site, like a blog.
See:

Referring to the above guide, I have done that with Jekyll, and since it uses JavaScript, it can be used widely.

And somewhat the opposite:

I hope that helps!

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Awesome. Thanks so much. I was considering WordPress so that is really great to hear it has a Discourse plugin.

Once I get the WordPress template good to go, I’ll work on embedding discourse.

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If you explore the Documentation category the sidebar if you access it there provides a really nice modified sidebar for easier exploring

You can embed discourse in a variety of websites.

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Thanks for the advice.

I was leaning towards WordPress but if you have another recommendation, I’ll be sure to look into that as well.

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I don’t have any direct experience with it myself. But have seen posts iirc on Ghost? Give me a moment and will see if I can find it.

But likely best to go with something you are familiar with as not sure if there are any learning curves

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I couldn’t find it in a quick search but may have the name wrong. With there being a plugin for WP likely one of the easier options. But don’t quite me. :wink:

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Lol I appreciate looking into it. The plugin for WP is really attractive for sure. I’m just afraid of really trying anything else with less support.

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Well the community and team here are excellent resources. Always ppl from both sides willing to help.

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I found the correct search term. “Ghost Blog” but think the WP route might be easier and has things like the plugin.

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CMSs should work with Discourse, not to mention blogging platforms. I set up a blog running on Jekyll, deployed on Render, to embed replies on it using Embed Discourse comments on another website via Javascript. It works well.

IIRC blog.codinghorror.com uses Ghost, and has the forum connected to it.

Another example is blog.discourse.org. It uses the same thing to post new blog posts in Announcements > Blog, and embeds replies in the blog posts.

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Something else to note. Since you mentioned free trial. Your looking into Hosted Discourse. So you need to look at the Hosting plans to see what plugins are included to help achieve your objective best. Ie if the WP plugin is included for example.

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Technically you can have a stand alone discourse site but as the other responses have stated you may want to have a word-press or other platform for site home page.

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Tools like this help:

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