I’m interested in possibly migrating about a dozen or so Blogger and Wordpress blogs (with unique domains) over to Ghost (as the blogging platform) and Discourse (as the commenting platform). Not only that, but the idea would be to set it up so that all the comments/commenters in the various Ghost/Discourse blogs connect to one another in a kind of blog-commenting ecosystem. On top of that, it would be preferred that each blog owner only has access to his/her commentariat. I’ve been told by @erlend_sh that for various reasons this would require separate instance of Discourse for each blog, but that they could all be connected by setting up one of the instances as an SSO provider. So what I’m wondering is:
In terms of the migration of comments, is this something that can be done by any computer literate person (albeit literate only in HTML and CSS coding languages), or would I need to hire somebody?
If I could do it myself, is there some kind of plug in for this?
Would it be best to go through Disqus as the middle-man commenting platform, or would Wordpress be adequate? (For the Ghost migration I’ll have to migrate all the Blogger blogs to Wordpress first, then to Ghost.)
I was also told by @erlend_sh that since “moderator-privileges over one category” is months/years away, this means that individual bloggers wanting control over their own commentariat would require separate instances of Discourse until that time. Moreover, if these separate bloggers wanted to have different approval setups for their commentariat, that would require separate instance of Discourse regardless. My next question then is, if each blogger had their own instance of Discourse, but also has more than one blog (each with a unique domain), would this mean that each blog/domain would also require its own instance of Discourse, or could the comments for all the separate blogs of one blogger be under one instance of Discourse?
With all these instances of Discourse, could they all be installed into one Digital Ocean account (each requiring a separate instance of Docker?), or would it be best for each one to have its own account?
5B) And if each instance could all be under one Digital Ocean account, would each instance need the 1GB (or is it 2GB?) of RAM each, or overall?
Once the migration of comments is done, would comments left by user A on the Blogger / Wordpress blogs connect up with user A’s comments made on the new Ghost/Discourse setup?
There are a lot of "this"s here, so I’m not quite sure how to answer.
I suspect that what you want is a bunch of instances on a single droplet in a multisite configuration. That’s a fairly complicated thing to get set up.
Next, I think, you want to configure one Discourse as the SSO provider and the rest as SSO consumers. There is no plug-and-play solution for that. An easier solution (that you could probably accomplish yourself) would be to use a Wordpress instance as the SSO provider.
Unless the Discourse WP plugin has some magic I don’t know about, I don’t think that there is an easy way to import just the existing comments from those multiple blogs to Discourse. I’d recommend having Discourse handle just the future comments on those blogs.
In the solution that I sort-of propose, the blogs would have both the comments that were part of that blog and the comments that were added on Discourse. You’d configure things such that all future comments were handled by Discourse, so in the future all comments would be handled by Discourse.
Hello @pfaffman, thanks for the reply. I was a bit delayed in getting back to you as I’ve been waiting for my webhost to first get back to me in regards to installing Discourse on my just-purchased managed-VPS. Apparently their system only supports Discourse on self-serve VPS’, so seeing how I can’t get access to my own installation of Discourse to figure out some things myself I’ll try and ask some clearer questions.
Okay, first off, I suppose we can forget about multiple instances of Discourse on a single Digital Ocean droplet. Not ultimately necessary, especially if it’s getting overly complex.
And putting aside the importing of comments for now, what I’m ultimately thinking about is having a bunch of blogs on Ghost (each blog has its own unique domain). I’d like all those blogs to have their comments connected via Discourse. So my simplified questions are:
Can one instance of Discourse handle multiple URLs (multiple blogs), or just one URL at a time? On top of that I wouldn’t mind each blogger having sole control of their blog’s comments, but seeing how category-specific moderators is a ways away, well, too bad I guess. But that might be a moot issue anyway if one instance of Discourse can’t handle more than one URL.
If a single instance of Discourse can’t handle more than one URL/blog at a time, I suppose that means multiple instances of Discourse (on Digital Ocean) for each blog. Those, I presume, would all be the SSO consumers connected to one SSO provider. Would that be doable without Wordpress? I’d like to keep this simple, using just Ghost and Discourse if possible.
Hope I’ve made more sense and been less convoluted this time.