Link existing forum topic to new WordPress post

Feature
1

After migrating from bbPress to Discourse I realised there’s one thing I miss about our old “forum for comments” integration (besides that, everything works way better).

Quite frequently, big news would be shared on the forum before it turned up on the blog. The topics that really stood out could be “featured” via a blog post. Before posting, we’d have the option of bbPress creating a new topic, or simply point to an existing topic, which in this case is what we’d do.

Quite handy!

18 Likes
2

This is an awesome idea. Generally the ability to manually adjust the post to topic connection would be hugely helpful.

3

Oh yes! This would be wonderful! As a site that posts news, it could definitely be an incentive for members to participate more in hopes of having their work published.

It’s like the ultimate reward for being an active member. I would love to see this.

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4

Great idea! Linking to an existing discourse post would be a great feature for wordpress sites to surface forum content for more exposure on the blog side and lead to additional discussions. Win win for both sides.

5

Two bonus features I neglected to mention:

  1. You can easily re-link old posts by pointing them to a directly related conversation on your forum (in our case they are 100% related since we were using bbPress for comments for a while).
  2. The whole plugin would become less “magical” this way, since a basic URL is quite straight forward. E.g. if something wrong happened when WP automatically created a topic for you, you could always create a new one manually and point to that one instead.
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6

Would this tie into the Discourse commenting plugin then? The comments would be easy to show I’m sure, but I guess you would have to just make sure you don’t select the “publish to Discourse” option in WordPress? That way you’re not posting duplicate posts in the forum.

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“Publish to Discourse” should only be available as an option if the “Use existing topic” field is empty.

The bbPress plugin I spoke of deals with it in a similar fashion:

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8

Ah okay, I only used BBPress briefly but I think that makes sense.

I mentioned the idea to some of the people in my site’s community and they loved the idea. I know that blogging options are used in some of the big names in Forum software and a lot of sites use them to broaden their SEO-- IGN and Buzzfeed are big ones that come to mind.

You could have it automatically post to a category like “Community Written” or something. It would be a great way to scout potential prospects for writing staff.

People love recognition and if you publish someone’s thoughts onto your main page, that has to be encouraging to a) post more often and b) post with substance.

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9

Just to clarify on one more point, what I’m suggesting here is strictly the ability to link (and unlink for that matter) WordPress posts and Discourse threads as you see fit.

I am not asking for the contents of a linked Discourse post to be pulled into the WP thread or anything like that. That work is up to the Editor. Personally I’d just write a brief manual excerpt (maybe in 140 characters or less and let WordPress deal with the Twitter/Facebook publishing as well) and link to the forum topic, with the comments showing below.

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10

To be honest, just the ability to make a forum post publish on the blog, would be a great first step.

11

I needed this, this week in fact. Toyed with trying to move existing posts into the new WP-created topic but it didn’t do what I needed.

Would be a great addition for the reasons mentioned previously.

12

There was a plugin developed a while back but does not look like it has been worked on in awhile. Not sure if this can be incorpated into the wp-discourse plugin.

1 Like
13

I don’t know if something like that should be in the wp-discourse plugin, but I think that using Discourse to create content for a WordPress site makes a lot of sense.

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14

I would also like to have this kind of plugin/feature. Our forums are much more active than blog section, and news break first there. In vBulletin 4 was great feature to promote topic to cms/front page as article. Something like that will be awesome to have for Discourse first posts to be published as blog posts in WP.

15

I have a situation right now where I want to embed a topic in a couple different sites. Which means that I now have a WordPress site where I want to use an existing topic as the embedded comments. Which brings me to this:

https://github.com/discourse/wp-discourse/pull/274

This PR adds a field to the meta box (Existing Topic ID). When a value is added to this field it uses that topic for the comments as opposed to the topic that was published. It doesn’t matter if Published is checked or not. This will override it. Clear out the field and it resumes it’s previous setup.

I’d love to see this make it into the core plugin! Let me know if I can do anything to help make it so.

4 Likes
16

I know @simon’s working on something similar but did this make it to the core?

If yes, how do I access this?

17

Not yet. It will be there right away.

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18

Not to bug you but I’ve been looking at various options to see how I can get discourse working and WP working on existing topics. Was even contemplating the

method.
It’s a blocker for me from deploying to production.
Kind sir, can I ask for an ETA? :slight_smile:

1 Like
19

Thanks for this great plugin @simon. I’d love to use this plugin for my blog but have put manual link to posts in the past. Is there any way I can manually make a connection and tell the plugin that a post already has a topic on discourse?

20

Not yet, but thanks for the reminder! I’ve been meaning to implement this for a while now. Would a discourse_topic shortcode work for you? It would take the topic URL as a parameter.

4 Likes