As important and vital it is to express your thoughts, it is easy to see that an online forum is no less than the act of articulation. It is one of those platforms that usually comes in the form of a message board, where people have the power to converse by posting messages. Individuals have the authority to construct a topic of discussion; they can put up questions or forward a point of view.
If you are on the verge of creating a WordPress website or have already created one – the necessity of adding a forum to it is there – more than you can imagine. Although there are a dozen community forum plugins, choosing the best one can be a bit daunting. Therefore, to help you, we have provided you with a detailed guide on how to do the process.
WordPress Discourse plugin is one such plugin that is well known for integrating WordPress with unique features. The plugin automatically creates a topic of the forum when a new blog is published, and thus makes the task easy for the developer.
WP Discourse
Discourse is an open-source community forum software and mailing management software management that provides the user with a WordPress forum theme.
The software breaks with the existing software by including features that tend to popularize large social networks such as infinite scrolling.
It grants users with features like live updates, drag and drop attachments, expanding links, etc.
To start working with a Discourse with WordPress, the user needs to have a separate installation of Discourse set up beforehand. Below are some of the steps that might help you with the installation.
Installing Discourse Plugin
Now that you are aware of all the features, factors, and forum themes for WordPress that are involved with Discourse and the CMS, you might want to download the plugin. To install Discourse plugin, the user needs to search for the plugin and then follow the following instructions:
From your WordPress dashboard
- From the WordPress dashboard, go to the plugin section, after that click on add new.
- Now, on the search menu type “WP Discourse” and then tap on search.
- Next, you would be directed to install and activate the WP Discourse plugin.
From wordpress.org
- To download the plugin go to the option that states “download WP Discourse.”
- Next, the user needs to upload the ‘wp-discourse’ directory. For that, the user needs to go to the settings wp settings-content-plugins-directory
- Next, they need to activate the WP Discourse from the Plugins page
With the help of Composer
If the user is utilizing the Composer to operate and manage WordPress, add the WP-Discourse to the project’s dependencies and then run:
composer require discourse/wp-discourse ~1.3.2
Or they can even manually add it to the composer.json with the help of
{
“require”: {
“php”: “>=5.4.0”,
“discourse/wp-discourse”: “~1.3.2”
}
}
Integrate WordPress and Discourse: What Does the Combination Offer?
- Ability to automatically construct or create forum topics and the discussion that is related to the blog, which is posted and published.
- It is used for utilization Discourse for comments and discussion of the WordPress post.
- Defining the category and the format of the post on Discourse
- Associating the WordPress author with respective Discourse accounts that do not require SSO.
- The replies that are from the forum discussion can easily be embedded in the WordPress blog post. The user can choose with the answers that might be used to display based on post score and commenter trust level.
- It provides the ability to configure the comments from Discourse, and then it can be displayed on the WordPress post.
Configuring the Plugin: Important Settings during Integration
Now that you have downloaded and connected the plugin, you would be convinced enough that it is by far the best forum theme for WordPress, and next, you only need to configure the same. Tap on the option that says Settings. Now connect the WordPress blog with a Discourse forum.
Connecting Discourse and WordPress
Tap on the primary link, and it would take you to the options page where the user would do the connecting to Discourse installation. Note that the URL to your Discourse is essential. The user would need to fill in the setting for ‘discourse URL,’ ‘API key’ and the ‘publishing username’ Some of the most important things that should be noted are:
Discourse URL: It is the base URL of the Discourse forum
API Key: This is found under the Admin of the Discourse forum
Publishing Username: This is an administration username on the forum.
SSO (Single sign-on) from WordPress to Discourse
For WordPress Website Development the plugin tends to operate with optional SSO functionality that is eligible to use the WordPress site as a single sign-on provider for Discourse forum.
This would help with overriding Discourse’s native and login workflow, and thus, it is only recommended for use cases that strictly require this setup.
Setting SSO up with WP Discourse plugin settings would allow the user to keep track of the potential WordPress audience and thus would enable them to use a Discourse community.
Therefore if you are a user that already has a steady WordPress Community with WordPress user accounts, and thus you want a Discourse forum without requiring an all-new membership drive, SSO is by far the best way for you to accomplish it.
Publishing and Comment Settings
Before you Hire WordPress Theme Developers, the user should know that they can replace WordPress default comments, or they can even add the plugin forum discussion in addition to the WordPress comment for Discourse published posts. The user has the advantage to decide whether they want to edit the full post of Discourse or not. With the help of a built-in trust system, the user can set trust levels for people to be able to comment and access the content so that they don’t get inundated with spam and trolls.
Things to Remember for Discourse and WordPress Plugin Development
Installation of Discourse might seem a bit daunting at first, but if every step is fulfilled according to the instructions provided, then the task would become easy. WordPress Theme Development Company usually take these pointers into consideration before they start with the process.
Here are some more points that you should know about before you start installing and doing the whole process:
- The plugin uses the Discourse API so the forum and the blog can be hosted separately, and then the integration would still operate. It is strongly recommended that the hosting of the two applications should be done independently since their hosting requirement is different.
- You can customize the comment templates. The HTML templates that are used for the publishing post on Discourse and for displaying the comments on WordPress can be customized theme.
- You cannot import old WordPress comments as Discourse comments.
- Discourse plugin acts as an interface between Discourse and plugin.
Wrapping Up
The Discourse community system is probably the best forum plugin that is available in the market. When the website owner is willing to think about their audience, the website becomes even more presentable. Setting up and configuring the backend process can be a bit daunting, but we hope that this article brings the possible solution that you are looking for.
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