ECHO Navigation

Grafts the ECHOcommunity website's header, navigation, language switcher, and footer onto the Discourse forum so conversations.echocommunity.org looks and navigates like the rest of echocommunity.org.

Part of the ECHOcommunity Discourse setup — the self-hosted Discourse at conversations.echocommunity.org. Family: infrastructure · echo-login · echo-locale · echo-nav · ECHOcommunity (main site)

Overview

The main site exposes its chrome at /{locale}/remote/{header,navigation,language,footer}. This plugin pulls that markup into Discourse's pages (server-side) and re-implements the small amount of front-end behavior the markup needs, so the forum carries the same branding/nav as the main site.

How it works

• Server-side injection: register_html_builder('server:header') and ('server:before-body-close') fetch the remote header/navigation/language/footer from www.echocommunity.org/{I18n.locale}/remote/*, wrap them in .echocommunity_core, and cache them in Rails.cache (1 day per locale).
• Front-end behavior (assets/javascripts/discourse/initializers/echo-nav.js, auto-loaded): the remote markup is Bootstrap 3, so the initializer re-implements its dropdowns / mobile collapse, swaps Font Awesome classes for Discourse's SVG sprite icons (incl. the FA6 search → magnifying-glass rename), and runs the search-mode switcher — all scoped to .echocommunity_core so Discourse's own UI is untouched.
• stylesheets/echo-nav.css: a namespaced snapshot of the main site's compiled styles.

Compatibility & branches

• Discourse v2026.1 (ESR) — Rails 8 / Ruby 3.4.
• Production branch: v2026.1-compat (currently v3.0.2) — what the deploy clones.
• v2026.1 specifics handled: FA6 icon rename (magnifying-glass); interactive JS lives in an auto-loaded initializer (plain register_asset JS is compiled to unused AMD modules and never runs on modern Discourse). See CLAUDE.md for deeper architecture notes.
• Note: master currently matches v2026.1-compat (the upgrade PR was merged here).

Installation

In the Discourse container config / CloudFormation after_code hook:

- git clone --branch v2026.1-compat https://github.com/ECHOInternational/discourse-echo-nav.git

Notes

• The header/footer markup and CSS are tightly coupled to the main site's output — if echocommunity.org changes its /remote/* markup or rebrands, styling/JS here may need updating.