Hello everybody!
I just installed Discourse on my new website and everything looks great except that I also need a website and not only community forum. I recently saw this website which perfectly describes my expectations and I’m curious - is that some kind of a simple plugin that makes an integration with the forum or what? I’ll be so grateful if someone helps and give me more information.
Best Regards,
Peter
the website you are looking at is a custom made site, which pulls selected categories from the forum.
Yeah, looks like a heavily modified Discourse site.
We’ve delivered similar “Homepage Dashboards” with lots of widgets like this for clients.
You can do this without having to spin up a separate website and keep everything “in framework”, keeping upgrades and maintenance fairly straightforward, so actually, no “integration” is required.
That said, if you already have another website, there are options to integrate it too, and it all depends on your requirements.
Here’s a site where remote data is integrated into the Discourse front-end: https://community.automox.com/, both from a blog and a systems API.
This amount of modification requires reasonable budget though.
You could start experimenting with the Layouts plugin and its set of widgets.
This amount of modification requires reasonable budget though.
I’m aware of that and it is not an issue. Just explain to me the easiest way of doing this, regardless of the costs. And is there a specialist here who I can pay to do such a thing?
Yes, it’s straightforward for an individual or team with the skills.
It helps loads if you can mock up the what you’d like (a basic layout sketch will help) and you can get freelancer attention by posting in marketplace.
Finding a freelancer is my last option. Could you give me some advice how to do it in the easiest way possible on my own? I’m capable of doing it myself.
To integrate offsite data within Discourse you are likely to need a plugin to do it properly so you can cache data server side and schedule updates so you don’t have to delegate this to the client which will slow page loads considerably.
I would start by understanding how to write plugins: Beginner's Guide to Creating Discourse Plugins Part 1: Creating a basic plugin
Knowledge of the theming system is very useful: Developer’s guide to Discourse Themes
The widget system: A tour of how the Widget (Virtual DOM) code in Discourse works
The Wordpress API if your source website is Wordpress: REST API Handbook | WordPress Developer Resources
Nokogiri for scraping: https://nokogiri.org/
That Discourse instance actually looks really cool. I wonder if the owners/developers would be willing to speak up? Maybe ask them about all the modifications they made to Discourse… 
I didn’t even realize that such deep modifications were possible in the first place. Funnily enough, I think this will come in handy for what I’m doing too! Thanks a bunch! 