Discourse Forum with my Wix website

[Gid (Sinedstro Cythan)]

I’ve explored & considering Discourse as a forum for my Wix site, but don’t quite understand some key things

Q1 How exactly is Discourse free? They say its 100% free if self hosting.
1.1 Does this only mean custom building this using your own infrastructure?
1.2 Does this also mean it can be free for those who already have hosting with a provider like Wix?
1.3 Does it not allow connecting to my own domain with Wix without paying Discourse?

Q2 This is just a feature of my Wix site. How can Discourse be set up/connected to/integrated with Wix?
2.1 Does Wix have some native integration for this?
2.2 Subdomains..?
2.3 Zapier?

I’m quite clueless about this setup, if people can explain an overview clarifying these that’d be great. Also, people who’ve explored & tried building forums for their websites, I’d appreciate related experiences, advice & tips.

[chapoi]

@Gid

Q1 How exactly is Discourse free? They say its 100% free if self hosting.

It is free when you self host (here is a guide), but the screenshots you have are from our free hosting, which is not the same as self hosting.

When you self-host, you can have any domain you want, when you are using our hosting, you can’t without upgrading.

[NateDhaliwal]

To run Discourse without any limitation, you can either self-host, or run the Enterprise plan with Discourse hosting.

Ultimately, it’s not that simple to be 100% free. Even with self-hosting, you need to pay for a server ^[1], domain (but Discourse now offers free *.discourse.diy domains during installation), and a reliable SMTP service if you have a large userbase (if not, something like Brevo with 300 emails/day could work).

@Gid

1.2 Does this also mean it can be free for those who already have hosting with a provider like Wix?

In terms of hosting, no, it cannot. It also won’t work, since Discourse needs a linux-based server, and uses a database, uses Docker, etc etc.

@Gid

Q2 This is just a feature of my Wix site. How can Discourse be set up/connected to/integrated with Wix?
2.1 Does Wix have some native integration for this?
2.2 Subdomains..?
2.3 Zapier?

Could you elaborate further on what ‘integration’ you’re looking for? From the top of my head, these few came to mind:

Embed Discourse comments on another website via Javascript

Discourse has the ability to embed the comments from a topic in a remote site using a Javascript API that creates an IFRAME. For an example of this in action, check out Coding Horror’s blog. The blog is run via Ghost but the comments are embedded from his Discourse forum. One important thing to note with this setup is that users have to navigate to your forum to post replies. This is intentional, as we feel that the posting interface on a Discourse forum is currently much richer than what we …

Trigger a Zapier task with Discourse Webhooks

[image] Want to use Discourse Webhooks to trigger a task via Zapier? Let’s get started! Tip: Zapier now has an official Discourse integration with built-in triggers and actions (e.g. “New Post”, “Create Post”). For common use cases, this is simpler than configuring generic webhooks manually. The guide below covers the manual webhook approach, which gives you more flexibility and access to all Discourse event types. Zapier requires a trigger and an action. In this howto the trigger…

(See all Zapier integrations here)

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1. Unless you use the Google Cloud or Oracle free tier, but those are so underpoered they can barely run Discourse. Your phone likely has better specs. ↩︎