NodeBB looks great for what it does: single-community forums. I'm wondering, however, whether it could be modified to support multiple communities without necessarily having separate instances of the software.

I was thinking you could treat categories as communities, but it doesn't look like NodeBB has a way for a user to "subscribe" to them such that their "front page" would simply be a list of populate posts for all of their subscribed categories.

Another worry would be scalability. It would seem like using a relational database would be better for tracking/parsing a lof of the data that a website of 100's of communities would need. (I'm NOT a DB expert by any means...just a hunch on my part).

Just wondering whether something like this should even be attempted or would simply creating this multi-community forum from scratch be a better approach.

Does anyone have any tips on setting up a proper plugin development environment? All the links I've found are at least 2 years old and I'm wondering if there is a "better" way of doing things.

@pitaj Thanks, your advice coupled with this post helped me get the syntax right:

how to create and use a template helper

@mrazadar using require.main.require is what I recommend for plugins and themes

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