A year and a half ago the Discourse on Ghost integration was announced, allowing Ghost members to seamlessly access the site’s forum with the same permissions they have on the publication. One “downside” of the integration is that it requires installation on a VPS, a task that many users of Ghost and/or Discourse may find a bit too daunting (as has been discussed on Ghost’s forum over the past few days).
Here on Discourse’s forum, the following was stated a few days ago about the integration of the two platforms:
While this would be great, another option might be the creation of a “ready-to-use” version that could be set up with Cloudflare Workers. While this would remove some of the friction for neophytes, an even better option might be the creation of a Discourse plugin, supposing such a thing is even possible. Seeing how there’s already a Sign in with Apple plugin, might this suggest that a Sign in with Ghost plugin might also technically be possible?
It’s doable, yes. Are there any docs somewhere for configuring Ghost as an identity provider? If yes and if oAuth is supported, you can likely use existing tooling to set this up without the need for a dedicated plugin.
So the current Discourse-on-Ghost integration would only need the D-o-G functionality to be self-hosted and not necessarily Ghost. Since that integration uses DiscourseConnect, it will work fine with any Discourse install out of the box, regardless on how it’s hosted.
Which would require self-hosting Discourse. So what problem would it solve? The burden would shift from self hosting a relatively simple Ghost-add on, to self-hosting Discourse.