Hi everyone. A client wishes to integrate Discourse with a diabetes knowledge base they are developing. Essentially there would be a site with two tabs: community (a Discourse instance) and knowledge base (a custom tool). In knowledge base mode, the user would be browsing various data types (glycemic problems, triggers, goals), exploring the relationships between them, and contributing their own information.
On most knowledge base pages there would be an embedded discourse topic view. So for instance, on the page for the glycemic problem 'Blood sugar too high after exercise', there would be an embedded Discourse topic for discussion on that glycemic problem, which would be created automatically when the object was created.
The Discourse topic view would be only one of several elements on the page, and thus it would probably be a slightly stripped down version (e.g. no 'suggested topics' at the bottom).
My question is: has anyone attempted something like this? And/or, how would people recommend proceeding?
My thought is to create several extensions to Discourse: an embeddable topic view, and 'view in knowledge base'/'view in community' links in the appropriate places to enable switching between the topic in community and knowledge base modes.
Aside from these modifications to the Discourse codebase, I would also be adding the custom code for the knowledge base portion of the site, which I envision living alongside the Discourse code in the same Rails/Ember app. Does this make sense?
Or should all this be a plugin? What is the status of the Discourse plugin system?
Thoughts are welcome! Many thanks!