Hello,
I am currently building a WordPress site for a community of about 3000 members. This WP site would feature several community-building functions, such as forums, events calendar (in which each user can add events), user roles/groups and membership-restricted areas.
I recently came across Discourse and I like its interface. So far I was building my site with buddyPress and bbPress but I’m thinking of replacing both with Discourse. Therefore, I’m wondering if the WP Discourse plugin would be suitable for this?
Basically I don’t want to simply transform the comments section into a Discourse section. Rather, I want the full Discourse community functionalities to be included directly within my WP site. People should be able to navigate from one to the other using a simple menu item, without changing the domain, and while remaining logged-in.
It is possible to integrate a Discourse site with WordPress with the WP Discourse plugin. For example, the WordPress site can publish posts to the Discourse site. You can also integrate authentication between the two sites so that users login to Discourse from WordPress using DiscourseConnect.
The main thing to be aware of is that WordPress and Discourse need to be hosted separately. They can’t exist on the same domain. A common approach is to serve Discourse from a subdomain of the WordPress site’s domain.
So, basically the answer to that integration question is no, and the only solution is to use Discourse as a commenting system, which wasn’t wanted. And the replacement for BuddyPress is SSO.
(At the moment) replacing bbPress and BuddyPress with Discourse is impossible, in the meaning everything would not work seamlessly together or even offers same functionalities.
Yes, Discourse is a great replacement for BuddyPress. I’ve worked with many sites that have used BuddyPress, then moved to Discourse, and been glad they did.
I understand what you’re envisaging, however there will never be a complete version of Discourse working within Wordpress itself. This question gets asked quite a lot so let me try an analogy here to illustrate why this is the case. Imagine there are two buildings, one is residential and one is an office.
Now, in modern town planning and the modern workplace there are quite a few different ways that you can bring the home into the office and vice-versa, ranging from home offices, co-working/living, mixed-used buildings and others.
Imagine Wordpress is the residential building and Discourse is the office building. In this analogy the WP Discourse plugin is essentially a co-working space inside of a residential building. It’s a place you can go to get an office environment close to home. You can review some work there and perhaps hold some meetings. For most of your work though, you’ll want to go over to the main office building where you have all of your teammates, and all of the resources you need.
As you may also know, the reality is that the nature of residential and office buildings are such that trying to truly combine them at scale will always be attractive in theory, and there will always be folks to whom that idea appeals on paper, however the practical, technical and cultural realities of such a fully fledged combination are why, in practice, we have separate residential and office buildings, and why, in a significant majority of cases, that makes sense.
