In a discussion titled “Super simple Discourse-Wordpress-membership integration,” Franz1 expresses concern about the complexity of existing integration methods, particularly referencing a thread on managing group membership via WP Discourse SSO. They propose using Discourse Subscriptions (an official plugin) for gating content on the Discourse side, and seek a simpler, free or low-cost WordPress membership plugin to mirror gated content. Franz1 also asks whether their existing N8N automation setup—already syncing Discourse with Mautic—could be leveraged for this purpose. angus reassures them that while the integrations require adding functions to WordPress, they are stable and maintained alongside official plugins like WP Discourse. They note personal experience using these integrations successfully in production and reference an additional method for syncing WooCommerce memberships with Discourse groups. angus advises against using N8N for this sync, as it’s more likely to break compared to the documented, official solutions. Franz1 thanks angus for the guidance and expresses relief at having a clear direction forward.
It looks extremely complicated and prone to break with updates.
So to keep things as simple as possible, let’s totally disregard the money issue and just consider that a part of a Wordpress site and a part of a Discourse forum are gated. Discourse does the SSO with the Wordpress plugin and Discourse Subscriptions creates the gate on the Discourse side.
Discourse Subscriptions is an official plugin and will be probably maintained and seems simple enough.
But I suspect there is even a simpler way to create gated content on Discourse without using Discouse Subscriptions.
But then the hard part: Is there a free or low cost Wordpress membership plugin that was able to easily integrate with Discourse to create gated content on Wordpress?
Also I have a N8N (an open source equivalent of Zapier) installation that is already connected to Discourse and that transfers some information to Mautic. May this N8N installation be used to sync the gated content between Discourse and Wordpress?
If you think that I am wrong and that there is a easier way to do that, please tell me.
Best
I understand that integrations can be intimidating!
While the solutions mentioned in that post require the addition of some functions to Wordpress, they’re not prone to break with updates. The WP Discourse plugin (also an official plugin) provides the utility functions described in the post and is maintained in line with Discourse in the same way the Discourse Subscriptions plugin is.
I’ve used these integrations myself on multiple production instances over a number of years. In a similar vein this is another integration you can use
While that’s possible, that’s much more likely to break than using the solutions described in the linked posts.