"Embedded" Forums
We're launching a new concept in Community Server 2008 called embedded forums (currently dogfooding). What you see right here is how this embedded forum works (go ahead and create a comment - the comment will be posted to a test forum on CommunityServer.com):
The way this thing works is that there's a tab in our forums app that let's you set some parameters for how embedable (embedible? embeddable? embed-able?) forums should work and Community Server provides you with a script tag that you can drop on basically anything.
Now we have the ability to comment on basically any content! I tested this for the first time while on a demo with a client - I know that's a bad idea! I told them as I did it that it was a bad idea but it was just too easy; I had to do it and it worked out great. I just dropped the script below in a local HTML file sitting on my desktop the loaded the HTML in my browser...
The script provided by Community Server for this forum is:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://dev.communityserver.com/forums/9/embed.aspx"></script>
I can drop that script in a Graffiti site, right here in my blog, on an HTML page - whatever... So easy! Every page that uses that above script will create a different thread back on the CommunityServer.com site in the Test Forum (No Anonymous Posts) forum.
Feel free to drop the script above on anything you want to test the functionality! I can't guarantee that the forum will remain open to support this embedded script but it works for now!