It’s exactly as you say, we have a very visited WordPress site, but we are moving user accounts, logins, article comments completely to Discourse. WordPress will become just a “DiscourseConnect Client”.
We publish about 13 articles per day 
People usually comment on new articles, but it is not uncommon for a discussion to develop on an older article. We try to update articles once they have been published several times over time. And newly added information to an article can reignite discussion.
We are happy to add a piece of code to WordPress.
Using the current WordPress plugin for Discourse, we plan to only add new articles to Discourse that have been published since 11/1/2023, but this will create thousands of unused topics in Discourse. Additionally, if someone wants to comment on an article from 2015, they won’t have a way to do so since the topic won’t exist in Discourse.
It would be great if the topic was created only when the user clicks on “start a discussion under the article”
How do I roughly imagine the whole process would work? I’ll give an illustrative if fictional example.
- In WordPress we have a draft article for example www.SvetAndroida.cz/android-telefony-2023
- we will publish the article
- still nothing is transferred to Dicourse
Then someone clicks on the “Start a discussion” button under the WordPress article
- at that point WordPress calls Discource to create a topic with the address komunita.SvetAndroida.cz/android-telefony-2023
- and after it is created, it redirects the user to Discourse to post the first comment
If someone on the same WordPress article wants to “add a comment” (another comment)
- they will no longer call Discourse and create a topic
- but the user will be taken directly to the Discourse when the button is clicked
- alternatively the “add comment” button no longer needs to be handled by JavaScript, but since the topic already exists, the button could just be an html link, which would be better from an SEO perspective
Using JavaScript would only create a new topic in Discourse if someone clicked “Start Discussion” and wanted to add the first comment.
We can probably do the whole solution ourselves, but we currently have a shortage of WordPress programmers. Additionally, it would be great if this functionality was included directly in the official Discourse plugin.