The discussion centers on integrating Teachable’s membership tiers with Discourse via SSO to manage category access based on user status. waffleslop seeks to ensure paid members gain access to specific Discourse categories via SSO, lose access upon cancellation, and asks how to handle users who join Discourse before Teachable. They also question whether a third platform like WordPress should act as the SSO provider to mediate between Teachable and Discourse. pfaffman notes that Teachable’s API access is limited to Pro tiers and suggests using WordPress as an intermediary if Teachable can push group data to it — though direct Teachable-to-Discourse SSO would be ideal if feasible. simon recommends advocating for Teachable to implement DiscourseConnect (like Memberful has), or alternatively, using Teachable webhooks to trigger Discourse invite emails via Zapier. This approach allows automatic user onboarding into Discourse without requiring direct SSO integration. The consensus leans toward using webhooks + Zapier as a practical workaround until Teachable offers native DiscourseConnect support.
We have a Teachable account with approx 5 membership tiers. When a new member is added to a Teachable tier, we want them to have access to Discourse via SSO and be granted access to specific Categories (already defined by Groups).
If a member stops paying, they must lose access to the paid Discourse Categories but maintain access to the free Categories.
The bigger issue is — what happens if someone joins Discourse but never joins a Teachable course? Or joins Discourse first and then Teachable second?
How should I think of what ultimately manages SSO for Teachable and Discourse? Do I need a third platform (Wordpress) to be the SSO Provider?
That’s hard to tell without more knowledge about Teachable. It looks like you can’t use their API unless you’re on their Pro tier.
If you know how to get Teachable to control WordPress and can manage groups in Wordpress that get pushed to Discourse, then that could work.
Teachable to Discourse would be best, if it’s possible, but it’s hard to tell if it’s possible. If you have access to their API, then a Discourse plugin that checked their status in Teachable (or better, made teachable the SSO source) could be what you want.
The ideal solution would be to get Teachable to support DiscourseConnect in a similar way to what Memberful have done: Integrate Discourse with Memberful - Memberful. This is something that would need to be implemented by Teachable. It might be worth asking them about it though. They could probably get some assistance setting up the integration from the Discourse team, or from the Meta community.
For now, I think the best you can do is to use Teachable webhooks to trigger a Discourse invite email when a new user signs up on Teachable. There are some details about that here: What can the Teachable webhook do? - #3 by RGJ
Note that the approach suggested in that post can also be used on sites that are not hosted by Communiteq. This is done by pointing the Teachable webhook to Zapier (or a similar service) and having Zapier trigger sending the Discourse invite email. Details about configuring that on Zapier are here: Automate sending Discourse invite emails with Zapier.