Best Practice: Wordpress or Discourse as SSO provider

I’m sure there’s not a catch-all answer for this but I’m hoping to get some thorough advice as to when one should use Wordpress (WP), or Discourse as the SSO provider. I’ve read several posts on Meta and also taken into consideration the suggestion offered in the WP Discourse plugin itself, like this:

Note: Discourse has a very good user management system. Don’t enable this setting unless you have a reason to manage your users through WordPress.

I’d love to see some delineation of some examples for which is the best choice for different scenarios, but here’s my scenario:

  • I’m building an LMS in WP
  • New users will first be introduced to join us by our main WP website
  • Users will register and begin taking courses from our main WP site
  • Within the first module, users will be invited to participate in the community (Discourse) with and “Introduce Yourself” type post
  • Users will typically be starting their day on our main site, and be visiting Discourse from the Community

I want to introduce as little friction and potential for problems with SSO as possible. I feel like the right choice is to use Discourse as my SSO provider. But I’m unsure if this will have any negative implications if I’m doing any granular user management in my LMS. e.g. I will be using a plugin that allows different roles (i.e. teacher, student, etc)

Looking forward to feedback from Discourse vetrans!

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I’m not really experienced in SSO, but to me this sounds like a perfect use-case for using WP as the provider.

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:arrow_up: I think this is key. Otherwise you would be starting your users in Discourse, sending them to WP, then back to Discourse. WP as SSO provider is better in your case.

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