The RobotShop community platform, built on Discourse, features heavy theme customization and is now live at https://www.robotshop.com/community/forum/. rbrlortie shared the platform for inspiration, highlighting its unique design and features.
rbrlortie explained that the URL structure, with a double subfolder (https://www.robotshop.com/community/forum), was due to project requirements and SEO considerations. codinghorror cautioned against this approach, citing potential technical issues, particularly with proxying setup on different servers. However, rbrlortie reported that their Amazon Cloud expert successfully implemented the setup.
The platform uses mostly CSS for customization, with some custom plugins for gamification and SSO integration. rbrlortie also mentioned some minor hacks for adding popups.
Some technical issues were encountered, such as broken links in system messages due to the URL structure. codinghorror acknowledged these issues and suggested tracking them for future fixes. neil has already fixed some of these issues, including broken links in system messages and the discobot tutorial.
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.
Nice design 
I like this part :
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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
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
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.
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.