It seems your requirements are in reality not compatible with the “breakout category” whitelabel solution we chose together in the beginning. Let me explain:
The first is possible for you (go to the Categories page, choose “+ New Category” from the top-right menu). The second one does not work, as Discourse has two levels of categories only, and your breakout category has one level of sub-categories. The solution we discussed in the beginning is to group categories visually on the same level rather than having true sub-categories. That needs changes to CSS code, either done by yourself in your theme repo, or by us.
Right. We didn’t think about that in the beginning. Would not be an issue in the alternative we discussed (“own Discourse installation”).
Same thing, would not be an issue in your own Discourse installation. It seems the integration is just too tight, and given that you want us to hide “your” content on edgeryders.eu, there are no benefits to that tight integration. Only the loss of control over your content on your side …
I didn’t understand it that clearly from the beginning. Because then, a separate Discourse installation is the better (and also simpler) solution.
Proposal for a solution:
I propose we switch the Biofabforum to its very own Discourse installation, using an own database and codebase. The codebase would be identical with our variant of Discourse, so would include Open Ethnographer and the option to attach to Edgesense etc. (once we have them ready for Discourse). However, it will be an independent installation, so all users signing up there are “your own”.
We would make this happen roughly within the budget limits we agreed on for the Biofabforum website project (with a bit of additional money from Edgeryders if needed). The effort is, let’s say, moderate as we did a fresh Discourse installation on the same server before and the theme for your website is already finished and can be re-used.
However, since Edgeryders is not interested in providing pure Discourse hosting services, this offer implies that you also agree on login and user account integration lateron (once we are paid by a second whitelabeling customer for further development of this whitelabeling tech). This idea is similar to the proposed solution in issue #129, except that only user accounts and not content is synced between the different Discourse installations. Users can switch between the “federated sites” in this content network with cross-links in a new menu section (“Edgeryders, Biofabforum” etc.) and we would add another notification menu with their notification from other federated sites (but users only see it if they get notifications, that is, use these other sites).
Let me know if this sounds like a reasonable solution for the current issues to you. Thanks again for agreeing to be the first customer for this experimental offer of whitelabeling … didn’t work out as planned, so let’s see how we can get to a properly working solution now …