Learn how to integrate Discourse Forum with WordPress in this tutorial. Using Discourse’s Official WordPress Plugin
A number of websites maintain a forum for their support issues. Moreover, it is used by the communities to share ideas and experiences. Companies promote their community forums. Because, it helps them build a community around their products where people talk about the product and share solutions. In this tutorial we’ll learn how to integrate Discourse Forum with WordPress.
It is a challenge to integrate a forum with websites powered by WordPress. Although, there are a number of plugins available to setup discussion forum. Like, bbPress and BuddyPress. But, it can be difficult to maintain a large community forum.
Discourse
Discourse is a 100% free, fully open source, modern, easy to use, feature-rich community-based discussion forum software. It accompanies a wide range of tools for community discussions. Therefore, its reliable and adaptable platform. Read More
WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular website building and blogging software. Its 100% open source and have a huge developer community. As a result, this makes it the number one choice of developers, bloggers and website builders. A huge number of online websites today run on WordPress. Because, it allows anyone with no development experience to build websites. Read More
Official WordPress Plugin for Discourse
Considering the volume of websites powered by WordPress. And, a huge demand of integration with WordPress. Discourse, has released an official WordPress plugin that makes the integration really easy.
WP Discourse is the official Discourse WordPress plugin is 100% open source. And, is freely available to download from the repository. Source code is available on Github.
This plugin lets you use Discourse as community engine for your WordPress website or blog. It has many features and some of the highlights of the plugin, and what can be achieved is as following.
- Automatically creates a forum topic for discussion when a new blog post is published.
- Associates WP author accounts with their respective Discourse accounts. Does not require SSO.
- Replies from the forum discussion can be embedded in the WP blog post.
- The plugin also comes with optional SSO functionality which lets you use your WordPress site as the Single Sign On provider for your Discourse forum.
- The plugin allows you to use Discourse as an authentication provider for your WordPress site.
Installation
You can easily install the plugin by searching for “WP Discourse” within your WordPress dashboard.
- From WordPress Dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Add New
- Search for “WP Discourse”
- Install and activate the WP Discourse plugin.
Settings
WP Discourse gives you full control with settings. It allows you to establish connection between the two platforms. Publishing Settings, allows you to control how you want to publish contents from WordPress to Discourse.
With Comments Settings you can choose to replace WordPress default comments completely or add Discourse forum discussions in addition to your WordPress comments for Discourse published posts.
SSO Settings allow you to enable single sign-on between your WordPress site and your Discourse forum. Therefore, it makes it seamless for the users to switch between the platforms.
Conclusion
In this tutorial we have learned how to integrate Discourse with WordPress. WP Discourse has made it easy to make a fusion of two top class products. As a result, integration with WordPress has solved problem of a huge community which was finding it difficult to manage a forum.