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It would be nice to make conform more to the pattern of our other REST APIs and be more resource oriented than action oriented.

Feature flags

ENABLE_DISCUSSION_SERVICE

If this setting is False, then we prevent access to forum endpoints by not including them in lms/urls.py. IMO, it would be better to guard the views themselves with a decorator that would raise Http404.

ENABLE_DISCUSSION_HOME_PANEL

This controls whether or not the discussion tab when initially loaded (without accessing a specific thread) contains the table with example icons, help text, and the notification setting checkbox. It should be replaced with an ENABLE_NOTIFIER setting that would control only the presence of the notification setting checkbox, and the help information should always appear.

Templates

Everything should be pure Underscore except for the main template for the discussion tab and module and (for now) the user profile, which exists as a completely separate page. The main templates should basically just contain an element into which the Backbone app can insert itself. We currently have some Mustache templates that should be straightforward to convert, and the _underscore_templates.html file contains many templates that should have all of the server-side (Mako) logic converted to front-end logic and be factored out into separate template files. The latter process has already begun.

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