We just released our Discourse instance (heavy theme customization)

Hi everyone,

We just launched community platform which relies a lot on Discourse. It features quite a lot of custom styles.

I thought that some of you would enjoy taking a look for some inspiration:

https://www.robotshop.com/community/forum/

Cheers,
R.

5 Likes

Nice design :slight_smile:
I like this part :

Forums
**Participate in over 30088 existing **
conversations, or start a new one today!

Search for topics …

**Ask a question **
Consult the Knowledge Base

Wow, that’s a really nice showcase of how flexible Discourse can be, how much of it is completely custom code and how much is just clever use of existing plugins? I recognize at least a couple :slight_smile:

1 Like

Hmm, double subfolder. I would definitely not recommend doing that.

Why don’t you have it at

https://forum.robotshop.com

Or at minimum

https://www.robotshop.com/community

2 Likes

Project requirements from higher up and SEO team. We already had a phpbb at /forum so the URL had to stay under the same domain.

We have:
https://www.robotshop.com/community
https://www.robotshop.com/community/tutorials
https://www.robotshop.com/community/blog
https://www.robotshop.com/community/robots

So it’s only logical to have:
https://www.robotshop.com/community/forum

That being said, we haven’t run into any issues with being under two subfolders. @codinghorror Any thing in mind that could go wrong?

The only custom plugins we made are those that communicate with our gamification system. Otherwise, all open source plugins.

There’s some hacks to add some popups, etc. but that’s it.

Otherwise it’s mostly CSS.

We also SSO between our platforms, so moving from the /tutorials pages to the /forum pages is seamless.

We have some nice widgets on our homepage too https://www.robotshop.com/community/

It depends, if you are running instances on different servers the subfolder proxying setup is extremely onerous technically and will lead to lots of long term support problems in our experience. If you have them on the same server it is less so, but this is basically impossible for paid hosting.

1 Like

Well, our Amazon Cloud expert worked his black magick to make everything work. He came out bloodied and mumbling in his sleep about proxy passes… but he pulled through.

So far, the only issues I have seen is system private message adding links that are href="/my/preferences/profile" and bring to 404s because it forwards the user to https://www.robotshop.com/my/preferences/profile instead of https://www.robotshop.com/community/my/preferences/profile.

You can expect to have a lot of issues like that. But @neil we should make a note of that one to fix as well.

I fixed links in system messages where I found them. The one reported here, and many in the discobot tutorial have been fixed.

4 Likes