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Here’s a rough mockup. This is the defailt view of the dashboard with the Discussions section added. It’s basically like slack with gutenberg blocks. A feed on the right shows all channels the user is a member of (read only) and the left panel is the current channel they are interacting with. This ensures everyone is up to date, and helps foster collaboration between teams. New channels can be made and exiting ones can be joined using the first column. A list of all users in each panel is in the center, and updates when you switch between channels.

This will also have a shortcode so that it can be embedded on the frontend. and if on another page in the backend, pressing the Discussion tab at the top will toggle hide/show the panel, overlaying it over content on other pages. On the dashboard, it will not overlay, but push content down instead (like the screenshot above.

Citations

[1]https://www.radiofree.org/2020/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Discussions-app-Mock-Up.psd.zip[2]https://www.radiofree.org/2020/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Discussions-app-Mock-Up.psd.zip