You might have noticed that if you link to a release, artist or other entity on MusicBrainz.org in a forum post, that this links gets displayed as a small info box with more details instead of just the link. Discourse, the forum software used here in MB community, calls these “oneboxes”. Discourse creates these oneboxes whenever you place a supported URL on its own in a single line.
Discourse itself already provides oneboxes for many external sites. For MusicBrainz I had created the Discourse MusicBrainz Onebox plugin, which uses the MusicBrainz web service to query and display additional details about pasted links.
This has been around since shortly after the MB community forums started, but I had recently updated it to support more entities and provide images for more of the data. So I thought it might be a good idea to give you a short tour over the plugin.
The plugin itself is of course open source and the code is available on Github. Please report any issues you find or suggestions on improvement on the issue tracker. But please keep in mind that the plugin can only show what is available with the MusicBrainz web service.
And if you maintain another music related Discourse forum you can of course also install this plugin there.
Let me show you some of the oneboxes the plugin generates:
Not yet here, but I had just added collection oneboxes after reading @UltimateRiff’s Brony post The plugin will eventually get updated here the next time @freso or @zas do update the forum.
Info on collection’s provided via the API is pretty limited though. So not much magic to show.
The plugin will eventually get updated here the next time