Discussion Redesign Architecture

Background

Adoption of the UI Toolkit and the Pattern Library
- See unnamed link and unnamed link
- We have to make the switch at some point so it would be good to start on an all new project
- If the UI is built in a separate repo then the shared components from teams will need to be moved out of edx-platform (cards, paginated components etc)
- How much does forums depend upon legacy edX styles?
- How do we support theming?
- How can we render inline discussions in the courseware if they depend upon the pattern library?
Testing
Can the discussion API be a standalone feature that could be used outside of edx-platform?
- Is there any benefit to yet another open source discussion solution?
- It would be great if the repo was self sufficient to support testing, independent development etc
- What happens with capabilities that are edX-specific?
  - Do we have to build teams knowledge into the UX/APIs?
  - How do we feed last activity information back to the platform?
What is our rollout strategy?
- Do we need to maintain the old UI for some period?
  - It will be more involved to rewrite the Discussion tab to use the new component
  - It probably makes sense to only switch inline discussions to the new UI
- How do we migrate courses to use the XBlock (assuming we do this)?

TBD