I am working to set up a community forum using Discourse which will be integrated into a website hosted on Squarespace, with the domain hosted on the same platform. Experience with Squarespace integration required.
Preferably, seeking someone in the United States or Europe for ease of payment and references. This is a confidential contract, and will require complete discretion, with an NDA.
Needs:
Ensure all features on the backend of the forum are appropriately set. I have already started work on all of the basic settings.
Assistance with paid memberships for the forum, as well as free memberships in limited circumstances.
Ensure that all settings conform with absolute anonymity of community members.
Assistance with seeding the forum and other ideas.
Assistance with Beta launch.
I do not need assistance with categories, topics, editing or drafting content. I only need the technical behind the scenes expertise of setting up the forum and helping to integrate it into Squarespace.
This should be a contract which requires less than 10 hours for an experienced individual. Please send proposed bids, and 2 examples of non-confidential Discourse communities you have worked on in the past.
Veteran standing strongly preferred, but not required. The mission of this forum involves loved ones of those associated with individuals who are justice involved, and requires an open mind and heart, and discretion.
I would like to target getting this set up by March/April timeframe for Beta launch.
Thank you for any interest you may have in this independent, limited, contractor role.
Hi RGJ - it means I am not an expert in integrating a Discourse forum into Squarespace but know that Squarespace is compatible with Discourse. I have a membership page on Squarespace, and the membership would be to become a community member of the Discourse community.
It doesn’t appear to be possible to use Squarespace as an SSO client or server for Discourse. If you’re collecting money with Squarespace, it might be possible to use its API to add users on Discourse to a group to give/remove access, but that’s not immediately clear. Looking at the Zapier integration, it doesn’t look like Zapier knows how to handle anything but form submissions on Squarespace.
The only thing that it’s clear you can do with Squarespace and Discourse is embed Discourse discussions on a Squarespace page, which doesn’t seem like something you’re interested in.
I don’t think that there is any meaningful way to integrate Squarespace with Discourse beyond having the two sites link to each other and have similar color schemes.
Do you plan to use the Discourse subscriptions plugin for paid memberships or something else?
Perhaps I’m using the wrong terminology when I say “integrate” - the ultimate goal is to have a community forum available on the Squarespace site. And to be part of the community, given the sensitive nature of the topics, members will pay a nominal membership fee to detract from lurkers. I thought it was possible to build a Discourse community and have it linked to the website: “Squarespace and Discourse can be integrated to add robust community forums to a website by embedding the forum, using subdomains, or automating actions via Zapier. Since Discourse is not self-hosted on Squarespace, the best approach is to run them side-by-side on a subdomain (e.g., forum.yourdomain.com) or embed specific topics using code blocks.”
Again, I am not an expert in this area which is why I would like to hire someone to assist.
Thank you for your response - All I want is to have a paid community forum, even if it links out to a subdomain. What I thought would be relatively seamless now has me completely confused
If people don’t need to log in to the website, Discourse can handle subscriptions and link to the website. So if the website is all just static public info, then it can Discourse can have web pages that link to each other.
Why do you need a website? What’s there that’s not part of the mostly-private forum?
