What is this forum built on?

#1

A while ago we said we were working on launching a modmore forum based on Discuss, and for a long time, that was indeed the plan. The rough design and implementation was there, but we ended up building it with Discourse instead.

If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s an open source forum solution built on Ruby and Ember.js that is built by a team including Jeff Atwood, one of the folks behind Stack Overflow/Exchange with a very impressive feature suite. Aside from their hosted option, they also offer support for a self-hosted forum with a Docker container. Installing Discourse on a fresh Digital Ocean droplet was a matter of following the docs and copy/pasting a bunch of commands and took less than an hour.

Adding single sign on (SSO), so people wouldn’t need a separate login for the forum from their existing modmore.com login, took another hour to develop. After that, we just had to tweak the design to fit our brand, which was limited to just configuration and CSS changes. As Discourse comes with quite sensible defaults, we haven’t really had to change much.

We’re by no means done with these forum, and I’m sure we’ll be making continuous tweaks to the forum as we learn more and get your feedback, but Discourse has already proven itself to be a very worthy forum. It’s fast, has a responsive/mobile design and an interesting trust system that I look forward to seeing in action.

I’m looking forward to using the forum for answering your questions, discussing ideas and communicating more often about what’s happening. Thanks for joining us!

#2

Are you thinking of releasing your forum integration as an addon? It looks good.

#3

Thanks James :smile:

It’s pretty much standalone, just made to look the same, unless you mean the single sign on?

#4

Ah nicely intergrated then :slight_smile:

#5

Thanks :smiley:

I’ll see if I can do a write up on how we set up SSO between the MODX users and Discourse, and also how we did some integrations with the main site (e.g. list of forum announcements in the sidebar at https://www.modmore.com/blog/ and the list of recent posts on https://support.modmore.com/).

Discourse is pretty cool on its own, so we didn’t have to do a whole lot of custom stuff yet.

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#6

Forum looks good - had an enquiry recently for a forum solution with SSO , so some docs about how to achieve this would be perfect timing! Great to see modMore expanding ever further… Keep up the fantastic work :wink:

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#7

Fantastic work. Forum looks great!

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#8

Fantastic forum indeed! But it needs a better “source code” support. Pasting code snippets doesn’t look good.

#9

@gadgetto did you wrap it in 3 or 4 backticks? With three backticks it seems to work better than four, for some reason :stuck_out_tongue:

<?php
echo 'Hello World';

alert('Foo is ' + 'Foo'.length + ' characters long');
#10

I really like the forum and was checking the code after 1 minute of using to see what is underneath :smiley:
Then I also found this thread. So:

It would be interesting to see some making-of information on this on modx.today :wink:

#11

I’m also very interested in this write up :slight_smile:

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#12

I registered just to say that I too would love to see that tutorial eventually :wink:

#13

Someone else built an extra called modDiscourseSSO that can be used. I looked at the source some time ago and it’s pretty similar in terms of code, so as I don’t seem to have had much time to do a write up yet, I’d recommend looking into that :slight_smile:

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