Convert Public Forum To Private for paid clients only

[PTKen (Ken)]

Hello. I originally set up my Discourse forum as a public forum. I also have included some Private categories that I was using for private discussions with clients.

However, I am changing my strategy for the forum. I now want the forum to be for paid clients only. I will eliminate the public component. (I don’t have any content that needs to be saved in the conversion.)

What is the best way to change this to a Private forum without starting from scratch? Is there some way to simply convert it to private, or will I need to re-install Discourse from scratch? I’m trying to avoid having to set up all of my admin settings and integrations again. I don’t have any users or posts that need to be kept, but I would like to hold on to the structure of the categories, etc. if that’s possible.

Thank you!
Ken

[Stephen]

Yes, just enable ‘Login Required’ under Settings/Login:

[PTKen (Ken)]

Yes, just enable ‘Login Required’

That’s too easy. I want something harder!

Thank you. I was hoping for an answer like that…

[Stephen]

Ok:

1. spin up a new VM
2. buy a new domain, the old one is dead to you
3. configure DNS
4. configure MailGun
5. follow the standard install guide
6. reconfigure your community
7. realise you got the header the wrong shade of teal, return to step 1.

[PTKen (Ken)]

Actually, I guess my question is a little more complicated. @Stephen answered part of it for me.

What I did not state is that I have set up SSO with my WordPress site to share the login. On WordPress, my users will be tagged to indicate that they should have access to the forum.

So, how can I control who gets to log in based on my WordPress tags (because that will indicate that they have paid)? Do I have to do this manually inside of Discourse (as I did for my clients previously)? Or is there a better way to accomplish this?

Thanks.

[Stephen]

If your WordPress users are a mixture of paying customers and registrants who aren’t allowed access then a common apporach is to use a plugin such as PaidMembershipsPro. By adding code to your themes functions.php your WordPress site can send group memberships over to your Discourse site.

Then in addition to ‘Login Required’ you can secure your categories behind groups which are populated by the WordPress plugin and SSO process.

The example code is in this post:

Managing Discourse group membership with WP Discourse SSO

The WP Discourse plugin has a couple of functions that can be used to associate WordPress users with Discourse groups. These functions could be useful if you have a membership plugin installed on your WordPress site. These functions are only enabled on sites that are using WordPress as the SSO provider for Discourse. The functions have been made with the assumptions that every membership plugin will do an action when it adds or removes WordPress users from a level, and that the parameters sent …

It’s not perfect, I believe @dfriestedt was working with @justin to clean it up and make the code more widely available:

Integration between paidmembershipspro.com and Discourse

What would you like done? I’m looking to integrate paidmembershipspro.com with discourse so when a member signs up to a recurring subscription they are added to a private member group in discourse. when that member stops paying for the membership they are removed from the discourse private group. When do you need it done? No rush. What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task? What ever is fair. However, I would like to make it open source so others can use it too for fre…

You’ve not elaborated on how you’re managing users or selling memberships on the WordPress side, so that’s the best I can do for now.

[PTKen (Ken)]

Thank you. I will take a close look at the links you provided.

I am managing my membership with MemberPress.

[Stephen]

In which case check out this topic:

Memberpress: how to add users to groups upon Sign up

The easiest approach is to use the Discourse WordPress plugin: WP Discourse – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org and enable Single Sign On between WordPress and your forum. This will make your WordPress site responsible for all user authentication on Discourse. To automatically add users to groups will require a bit of custom code. The WP Discourse plugin has a couple of functions that can be used when SSO is enabled for automatically adding and removing users from Discourse groups. The functio…

[PTKen (Ken)]

Thank you. I’ll take a look. I expect this will be enough to close this topic. I appreciate your help…

Ken