Hi guys,
I‘m working a lot with Nextcloud for document management and like to include individual folder sharings inside Discouse wikis / topics to offer direct access. The best way would be a plugin, that dynamically shows the files and sub folders as expandable detail list view.
| File | Type | Size |
|---|---|---|
| > Folder | ||
| … | ||
| … | ||
| … | ||
| … |
Is this possible? Is this a „job“ for Nextcloud or Discourse developers?
Best
I think you need a Discourse plugin. Are the linked files and folders publicly readable?
I know that @joebuhlig uses owncloud (EDIT: He’s mentioned one of those xxx-Cloud things to me recently 
) , so his team might be a good place to start.
I guess so.
Usually not. I prefer sharing these folders by link and separate password. Maybe it’s possible to add the password into the link scheme? The user shouldn’t notice that access restriction too much. Therefore the user shouldn’t be asked to enter the pw manually. It’s important for me, to keep some folders semi private and everything smooth as possible.
Clarification: We don’t. We’ve explored moving from GSuite to NextCloud recently, but are far from making that decision.
I’m assuming a plugin is needed here as well. I can’t recall an embeddable script from NextCloud existing anywhere.
That said, you’ll probably need to use the NextCloud Client API to recreate this. But that comes with all kinds of questions.
Where do you put this file structure within Discourse?
Will it exist multiple times?
How much functionality do you need for it in Discourse? Read-only?
How much effort are you willing to put in for this to exist? (Or what kind of budget?)
Is it really worth it? You could just link to the folder.
Usually, I’m linking the Nextcloud folder at the categories pinned introduction topic. But I also like to share folder content within any other post to offer instant access for course material / project files and more.
I guess not. Why is this relevant? It might be possible some NC folder sharings could occur multiple times within one Discourse instance.
Read-only would be perfect. I need the information about file/folder names, file types, sizes, the option to expend / collapse sub folders and a direct download link.
In case the shared folder is password protected, the PW and direct link to NC should be noted somewhere beside the listing view.
It’s a complicated and fair question. I’m not very experienced in (web-based) software development and the cash flow is always an issue 
I have no commercial use-case. I’d like to close the gap between course document management and an excellent community experience. Each course has it’s own category Moodle and OpenOLAT have a bad user experience.
I would say, yes.
Having a seamless user experience in discussion and document management is the goal for integrative / barrier-free “groupware”. I would compare it with the back linking (feedback loop) of Discourse’s github commits at the comments section on github.com. Every time the users need to open the link separately on anther tab / window, he/she will be interrupted and gets confused from different platforms and usabilities.
It changes the way you build it. If it only exists in one place at all times (sidebar?) then from a development stance you treat it differently.
Pretty sure this is unnecessary if you have an API key for an admin account under Site Settings.
I would suggest formalizing it under #marketplace.
Just be aware that what you’re asking for isn’t trivial or quick. It’s a pretty advanced build so it’ll take someone a significant amount of time to get it right.
Thank you very much for you’re kind help and #marketplace advice. Interoperability isn’t and won’t be trivial in near future without standardization and solving compatibility issues of standalone software. If this feature will come true, we’ll / I’ll need to find a way, to use WebDAV as bridge technology. 
Hello, we also work a lot with Nextcloud and we are wanting to implement Discourse, so I wanted to consult you if you could include for the management of documents and the individual shared folders within the themes / wikis of Discouse to offer direct access. Or if you could relate Nextcloud and Discourse in some way. From already thank you very much!
Discourse supports image and files via s3.
S3 can be selfhosted using Minio.
Nextcloud supports S3 storage via external storage app.
Nextcloud supports Discourse SSO as well.
All of these applications could also be linked via LDAP.
Hope this helps anyone else curious about this sort of integration. 
This topic was created in 2019 and nextcloud has evolved quite a bit since then. I’d be interested to learn what folks are doing with Nextcloud 21 and how you are contemplating using it in conjunction with Discourse, in a “groupware” context.
From my understanding, the answer to the question in the OP:
is YES. Discourse is a discussion platform, while Nextcloud’s original super power is about file syncing and sharing: https://nextcloud.com/files/
Maybe the answer is to go back to Nextcloud and see if there is an appetite for leveraging Embedding Discourse Comments via Javascript. It could be offered as an alternative to Nextcloud comments. Right now Nextcloud looks like this in the sidebar:
With embedding discourse comments, you’d be able to click a link to start a topic in Discourse to start talking about any file or folder, and see all the replies. The topic will have a link back to the nextcloud file or folder.
Linking over Nextcloud 20 adds Discourse Notifications and allows unified search with your forum so those in this thread can reference it as well.
Linked this discussion to Nextcloud’s discourse instance as well.
Interesting idea since Comments have been in need for finessing for sometime.
Thinking about possibilities:
My .02 is if it is at all possible, please help improve Nextcloud comments! It is a great concept which is receiving no attention. It would be so awesome to improve!
Thanks @sunjam! I’m a member over on help.nextcloud.com/user/tobiaseigen too so we can talk over there about any work people are doing to improve or add on to nextcloud. The Discourse dashboard widget and unified search is also interesting. I’d suggest focusing on a few things that Discourse is really good at and just turning off all the competing functionality in nextcloud, rather than trying to integrate all the things™. To me this is primarily discussion, but also user management and security features. I’d like to see Discourse be the identity provider for nextcloud and other collaboration tools using OIDC. This is currently not possible - if you want to use Discourse as identity provider you have to use our bespoke functionality which requires programming.
For context, right now my interest in this is mostly personal (I use nexcloud and Discourse for various personal projects). I can well imagine that nextcloud might also be of interest for others who use Discourse for collaboration, including in particular Discourse for Teams customers. It’d be great to be able to just set up a companion nextcloud server alongside a Discourse site to easily sync and share media and other large files without having to resort to social media or google drive etc.
Sure, just trying to kitchen sink ideas to this thread, cause whatev’s to keep the conversation going. Both are great projects whether they further integrate or not.
Unfortunately, I do not find either particularly helpful for myself at this time. Concept is fun.
Cheers. 
owao. verrry impressive topic. any news on this? Or any one tried to implement some integration?
Great thread over here. We are looking the same, plugins seems to be outdated.
I think that features could be great and not too much complex to develop:
Currently possible:
