Companion Discourse plugin for Wordpress

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Continuing the discussion from Formatting:

From what I know, Discourse has a WordPress plugin, but WordPress does not have a companion Discourse plugin for WordPress. What I mean by this is a plugin I can install on Discourse that will modify Discourse to better work with WordPress.

I never thought it would be needed, and I don’t really know what features it would have, but one that popped out to me is to be able to identify WordPress HTML classes to be used in Discourse posts so that when the WP Discourse plugin imports WordPress posts, the HTML classes do not get stripped out.

Maybe it could also include a way to import/mirror the CSS from WordPress so that the classes look the same as well.

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I like the idea of being able to allow specific CSS classes for embedded posts.

Another possible approach for getting an accurate representation of content from external sites on Discourse would be to generate an embed version of each post on the external site. That version would be intended to be displayed in an iframe - similar to what Youtube does by creating a version of each video at https://www.youtube.com/embed/video_id.

Instead of posting HTML to Discourse, or having Discourse attempt to scrape the post’s HTML, the post content from the external site’s embed URL could be displayed in an iframe.

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I appreciate that suggestion. I’ve thought about doing that for the interactive transcripts on my podcast site, as to try to get the javascript to work on Discourse seems more of a challenge than I want right now.

However, the downside of it being an iframe, I assume, is that Discourse search wouldn’t index the words within the iframe, correct?

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I don’t think Discourse search will index content from inside of iframes. Google will index content in iframes though.

For Discourse search, the trick would be to get some relevant content outside of the iframe. The title and tag would be a good start.

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Yeah, in my case I was thinking to put the non-interactive transcript as plain text in the Discourse post and the interactive one maybe as an iframe, both under details elements.

But I think for some people who are using WordPress with Discourse, they may not have as much developer knowledge and a way to make sure the classes and CSS align may go a long way to making it just work magically for them.

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