Hello, I’m brand new here. I was wondering the following:
I have a Discourse paid plan already setup at a subdomain (forum.mydomain.com) and i have also a paid plan with the Ghost platform on the main domain (both are not self hosted).
I would like to use the Ghost SSO for my discourse. Meaning my premium subscriber from ghost should get automatically access to my discourse which otherwise is restricted / private.
The docs or explanation in the ghost discourse forum as well as the arcticles i found here are discussing it in the context of self hosting and doing a lot of additional set up / coding which i’m not sure is relevant in my case.
Can somebody point me to an article/doc which gives instructions for the use case i have (when both platforms are paid plans) or can explain how can do this?
Or in the extreme case know a developer who could help me?
From what i read and understand it should actually be possible or not?
I forgot to add:
I’m not interested to add discourse to my ghost comments (although this would be a added bonus) but mainly how to use the SSO ghost offers and connecting it to discourse
If I’m understanding things correctly, Discourse on Ghost is primarily (?) intended to be used with self-hosted Ghost installations with Discourse on Ghost installed on the same server as the Ghost installation is run from. There’s also an option to use JSON Web Token authentication. It seems that method would allow you to install the Discourse on Ghost application on a server that you control, while having both Ghost and Discourse hosted on paid plans.
My understanding is that this means that there isn’t currently a non-technical way of getting this to work. For your case, you could have your Ghost blog hosted on the Ghost platform and your Discourse site hosted by Discourse, but you would need to setup a server on a VPS to run the Discourse on Ghost application: GitHub - vikaspotluri123/discourse-on-ghost: Add Ghost-based SSO to Discourse.
That seems like an interesting problem, but maybe it’s more technical than what you are wanting to get into.
It would be great if the Ghost platform supported DiscourseConnect out of the box, in a similar way to how platforms like Memberful support DiscourseConnect.
Initially i was very hopeful that i found my ideal setup but it seems it is like you stated that it works on / is meant only for self hosted. This is such a disappointment for me. It would definitly be a plus to have some kind of plugin or automated service for beginners that they could offer but i guess it is a niche problem.
My other option is to completly abandon the paid hosting and setting everything up for self hosting, going in kneedeep
I also love both Ghost and Discourse (I have blogs hosted with official Ghost, and have worked for company that uses official Discourse hosted plan) and would love for this to be a more straightforward process too — having Ghost members be the source of truth for Discourse.
Ghost does take note of feature requests from customers so you also could let them know via support@ghost.org
In the meantime, I think you could also possibly post on the marketplace for a developer to set it up one time for you. (As Simon mentioned, if you go with the JSON Web Token authentication option, you could keep both your paid Ghost and Discourse plans, and have another VPS handle Discourse on Ghost)
It would probably be a more suitable request for the Ghost forum marketplace rather than the marketplace here on Discourse. You could potentially also ask / @mention the creator of Discourse on Ghost (Profile - vikaspotluri123 - Ghost Forum) to see if they would be available to do the work.
As an active member of both Discourse and Ghost communities I agree that posting on the Ghost forum as well as PM-ing vikaspotluri123 directly is your best starting point!
Thank you. I did my research on the Ghost discourse website too and it really looks like the self hosting is the main target group. I agree with you as well that it should be more a straightforward process to reach more people as both are great products and do well together. Because of the complexity / set up i will consider it for the next project.
I believe I may be able to offer a somewhat simple solution for this as far as self-hosting goes.
I have been building a ghost provisioning and management platform for the last few months. I believe I can integrate this so activating is just a click from inside the management dashboard.
It will be a month or so before full fledged testing starts and probably two months before service is public.
and it really looks like the self hosting is the main target group. I agree with you as well that it should be more a straightforward process to reach more people as both are great products and do well together. Because of the complexity / set up i will consider it for the next project.