Do Wp Discourse Widget Work With All Wordpress.org Templates?

Soapbox is one of the most popular community forums software platforms bachelor today. Different a lot of its competitors (bbPress, BuddyPress), Discourse doesn't natively run off of the WordPress architecture. It has to be contained on its own server. That shouldn't scare you, though. The developers understand that ane/3 of the internet tin can't be ignored, and then they fabricated information technology exceptionally easy to make these two powerhouse platforms play nice with each other. With the official Discourse WordPress plugin, you can make these two platforms interact like they were made with the other in heed.

Integrating WordPress and Soapbox

We are going to practice this is by using the WP Soapbox plugin. It's the official release by the devs, and it will let you do two primary things.

Simultaneously publish to Discourse any posts y'all create in WordPress, starting a new thread on the forum
Publish any replies inside that Soapbox thread to the WordPress post every bit a comment.

By doing this, you will essentially accept a Disqus-like comment system that's under your own control. You lot will besides

Unfortunately, Soapbox doesn't support embedding an unabridged Category (what Discourse calls the individual forums) into a WordPress post or folio content area. You can plough off WordPress-specific comments to only have Soapbox every bit your method of discussion. To comment, someone must be registered through your Discourse customs forum.

Why Requiring Discourse Registration is Expert

Adding that extra level of friction to leaving a comment might seem like a bad idea at first. But if you're set up on edifice up your Discourse customs, it's non. Doing so accomplishes three things:

It directs people to your forums so they come across more of your content and how engaged your community is. This is not the instance with a traditional commenting organisation, even an integrated one such as Disqus.
Yous gain members of your community, not simply i-off commentors. These people tend to be more engaged and more likely to stick around. They additionally become a office of your marketing campaigns and lists.
Spam comments boring down. Brute-force WordPress attacks and spam campaigns target the traditional annotate system. With the registration required, a much more than sophisticated level of spambot has to exist employed. Nigh probable, you lot won't run into many — if whatever — of these.

While having discussions and a number of comments on a postal service is a adept thing (keen even), having an engaged community fabricated up of regulars who become fans of your content and a defended audience is even better.

With That In Mind…SSO

SSO, or Unmarried Sign On, is a kind of middle-ground for that. Setting information technology up within the WP Discourse plugin settings will allow you to go along your existing WordPress users and let them employ of the Discourse customs. The devs don't necessarily recommend this for a few reasons (including the ones higher up). The primary one existence that Discourse has a strong login flow and database construction, and using SSO breaks that period.

That said, if you already have a steady customs of WordPress user accounts, but want a Discourse forum without requiring an all new membership drive, SSO may be the all-time fashion for you to accomplish that.

WP Discourse

To begin the process of using Soapbox with WordPress, yous need to have a carve up installation of Discourse prepare up. Y'all can follow our guide to set your community forum up on a Digital Ocean Droplet to get started. One time that is finished, yous should head over to the WP.org plugin repository to install WP Discourse.

When activated, a new menu option will appear in your WordPress admin panel chosen Discourse. You see a number of sub-menus that will help ease the integration of a Discourse forum on WordPress.

Connecting Soapbox to WordPress

Click on the main link, and it takes you to the options page where you lot do the connecting to your Discourse installation.

The URL of your Discourse installation is important. It's not the IP address of your Digital Ocean Droplet, but instead the actual domain name that you gear up during the installation. The username should probably be changed from organization to whatever yous used as your main admin user.

The real key here (heh heh, pun intended) is to make sure that your Discourse customs has an API Key created. If this wasn't part of your installation process and fix, you tin go to discourse.example.com/admin/api/keys as your admin user and create one with a single click.

You can also navigate to the page via the tabs at the superlative of your account dashboard. Simply copy the API Fundamental and paste it back into the dashboard of your Discourse plugin options. With that washed, navigate to the WordPress user profile that you desire to associate with that Discourse admin account. Yous volition see a new field when you select Edit User asking for a Discourse user name.

Publishing and Commenting Options

And so there's just fine-tuning how yous want the comments and posts to appear on each platform. You lot can choose whether to publish full posts to Discourse, to utilize those as excerpts to bring people to your principal website, and tweak categories, tags, and even the CSS for how the comments appear.

And with Discourse'due south built-in trust organisation, you tin set trust levels for people to even be able to annotate and access the content so you don't get inundated with spam or trolls.

Finishing Upward

Because it's non built directly into the WordPress CMS, Discourse might non be the first option for forum software. All the same, if you lot have the time to learn the app and ready a Discourse WordPress integration, yous might discover your customs date rise. The initial set upwards for the community forums might exist a little more taxing than one of the WP-based plugins, but when you combine that with the official WP Discourse plugin, opportunities for community growth and engagement are just every bit like shooting fish in a barrel every bit anything native in WP.

How practise y'all integrate your forums into WordPress?

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