I’m looking to use Discourse as discussion platform within a membership site – but as a non-techie, I don’t know how to “make it fit”.
The membership site runs on Wordpress, together with the plugin “WishList Member” (WLM).
WLM receives notifications from my payment provider about new members who purchased, and about old members who cancelled their subscriptions. So WLM manages the user database, and assigns levels to the different users.
WLM also controls, which pages on the site a user can see. For instance, non-members might be able to see only the “Welcome” page, whereas only paid members with active subscriptions can access other pages.
In my case, I’d want several parts of my site to be “paid content”, and one part of that would be the Discourse forum.
That means…
Discourse needs to use the Wordpress user database.
There should be no separate login to Discourse once a user has signed in on Wordpress.
The Discourse forum needs to be integrated into a Wordpress page, so that WLM can control who can see it, and who cannot.
I’m looking to hire someone to help me with this. But I think I’m not competent enough about how Discourse and Wordpress work to be able to hire the right person… or even to describe the project well enough for a programmer to know what needs to be done.
Ok, I moved this to marketplace. I am not aware of anyone that has used the WordPress user database as single sign on for Discourse yet, but that is a reasonable request.
Did you ever get a resolution to this? We have the same setup (Wordpress + Wishlist) and having the convenience of single signon is a deciding point in moving forward with Discourse. If you already paid for development, we would be interesting in buying it as well.
I’ve basically got this all done with using a fairly no-frills Gravity Forms + Stripe plugin. I’m about a week away from launch and after I’m 100% certain everything is tight then I might be able to help you out @LeoB. I’m unfamiliar with WishList Member but there’s really only one spot I need to hook to make the integration. Do you know how it saves user permissions in WordPress? Are they saved as user meta?
That sounds interesting, @AdamCapriola. Sounds like a very straighforward integration. I’d love to see it in action.
Regarding WishList Member:
I am not sure how it saves the user permissions. I’m not a programmer, and my understanding of MySQL is rudimentary at best.
There’s a field in “wp_usermeta” called “wp_capabilities” that has values like “a:1:{s:10:“subscriber”;s:1:“1”;}”. However, I’ve got WP installations where no WL Member is running, and yet they have the same field. Plus, in the WP installations where WL Member is installed, there is a table called “wp_wlm_userlevels” with the columns “user_id” and “level_id”. So my current guess is that WL Member keeps its own table where it assigns user permission profiles to the different users.
Let me know how your launch goes.
And yes, I’d love to talk with you once you’re done.
Anyway, I’ve had some setbacks so I haven’t been able to launch quite yet.
This kind of integration really favors custom coding – I don’t think a plugin would work so well. There are just so many parts to it (sign on, group sync, email sync, etc.) and group syncing is highly dependent on which membership plugin you’re using.