Configuring SSO to Work With SocialEngine

Dev
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I just installed discourse and we are starting to build guidelines for our community, start a couple of categories etc etc.

We have an existing installation of SocialEngine (PHP/Zend) and I would like to give our existing SE users the same login and account on discourse with the ablity for discourse to also create an account in socialengine for them when they signup on our forums.

What are my first steps towards doing this? I am not a developer perse, but I’m not afraid of digging in some php files and I’m trying to gauge the effort that might required to do this. I’m not opposed to hiring help for this BTW.

Of note, we also have a Wordpress install that we are working on at the moment. There is a Wordpress <> Socialengine plugin that will create SSO between those. I’m wondering if I could use that, along with the Discourse Wordpress plugin. That sounds like a lot of stuff to go wrong?

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Looks like SocialEngine is the source of truth for Wordpress.

This way, you can make SocialEngine the source of truth for Discourse too.

You can implement a sso.php page using this guide.

Also, this may help you: Discourse SSO and API Helper for PHP

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I’m curious where WP comes into this though. Do you really need users synced on WP as well? We use WP for blog.discourse.org, but we haven’t set up SSO for it because it’s strictly used for blogging and not user management. We don’t need any syncing beyond matching WP staff usernames against Discourse staff usernames.

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Thanks for chiming in.

We’re kind of in a transition (read analysis paralysis) between socialengine and wordpress. The UI/UX and general code quality in the socialengine ecosystem is not so great. But we have a bunch of time invested in it with directories and articles that we would have to migrate without killing our SEO love. So a transition will take time and I’d hate to make the SE members sign up again on the discourse forums. In the meantime, newcomers to the website “ecosystem” (Homermobile!) will need to be able to login to socialengine to create events, articles, directory entries yadda yadda.

One other reason for wordpress is that we will likely build a store on woocommerce.

URLs would probably help huh?
www.kartpulse.com (socialengine)
discourse: https://forums.kartpulse.com

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If you plan to get rid of SocialEngine one day I wouldn’t use SSO then.

Just use social logins on Discourse (Facebook, Twitter, Google) and creating an account is a breeze.

Afterwards you can try to sync some info between the two.

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Well, my 2cents (very literally not worth more than 2c, because I’ve only spent 1 minute on your website as I write this):

Scrap SocialEngine and go all-in on WordPress+Discourse.

  • The SSO integration will be much easier to maintain (and like Rafael pointed out, you wouldn’t even need SSO until WordPress needs to be used for user management)
  • Two platforms are much, much easier to maintain than 3 (it really does become exponentially harder)
  • Discourse and SocialEngine won’t compete for your user’s attention with overlapping features
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Thanks for taking time to look at the site :smile:
Trust me I do NOT want to try and manage three platforms…

Thinking more about this, any move to wordpress is going to be an incremental and slow one. It seems like it may not be a huge deal to get Discourse SSO working with SocialEngine, so I will look more into that and see how I can get it done. Or who I can ask to try and do it…

Any suggestions/recommendations for the latter?

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If you can afford to spend a bit of money on this then you could put up a list of requirements in our marketplace category.

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