Building a custom frontend for the Deck App - Any experiences?

[fenglisch]

Hey there, we are building and hosting collaboration & networking platforms for our customers. We already have the Nextcloud Files App integrated, but it opens in a new tab with its original frontend, creating a design breach for our users.

Now, we want to properly integrate the Nextcloud Deck App into our platform as well. Instead of embedding the boards as iframes (or even worse, opening them in a new tab as well), we would like to built a custom frontend with React + Chakra UI to offer a seemless look and feel. The features shall basically be the same as in the original frontend, so we are currently not planning to add or remove significant parts.

Looking at the API of the Deck App, this seems to be possible (it will of course be a lot of work). However, we could not find any examples where anyone else did this (or tried this). Learning from successful or failed experiences of others would help us a lot in evaluating whether building a custom frontend is a good idea. Does anyone know of any attempts? It must not be regarding the Deck App, but can be about other apps or Nextcloud in general. Thanks a lot, we really appreciate it!

[juliusknorr]

It’s great to hear that you’re integrating Nextcloud into your platform. Building a completely custom frontend for Deck is certainly possible via the API (one of the best examples that this works is the Android app at https://github.com/stefan-niedermann/nextcloud-deck), but it would indeed be a significant amount of work.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, have you considered contributing to the existing Deck frontend to introduce more flexible theming or embedding options? This would not only reduce maintenance overhead for your team but also benefit the broader Nextcloud community.

By integrating with the existing codebase, you’d also ensure continued compatibility with future updates and features, avoiding potential API changes that could break a standalone implementation.

The Deck team and community would likely welcome contributions that improve adaptability without sacrificing maintainability.

If there are specific UI/UX challenges you’re facing, maybe we can explore ways to enhance the integration experience within Nextcloud itself. Let us know your thoughts!