What version is the Wordpress plugin relative to standalone, and how will this be handled?

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Hi everyone,

I’m a complete newbie site owner and hired a freelancer to put some stuff on my new site. I had seen Discourse running the SmartThings forum where it looked great, so I wanted it. The freelancer is not familiar with Discourse but found the Wordpress plugin for it. I noticed the meta info for the plugin says it is version 1.0, as also stated by Cossar here.

Questions:

  1. Is this the same as standalone Discourse, which is up to v. 1.6 (if I’m reading right)?

  2. When standalone Discourse is updated in the future, will changes automatically make it into the WP plugin, or will Cossar need to do that?

  3. If some third person (e.g., Cossar) is doing this, is this support sure to continue for years to come? (Getting Discourse updates to the WP plugin)

The bottom line here is should I use the WP plugin (which seems easier up front), or insist that my freelancer install the standalone version. Of course, they will do it if I insist. But I don’t even know if that’s a good idea.

This is for a small personal site where I will be doing some technical, personal, and gaming blogging and discussion. Maybe it will grow to be modestly big in coming years, but most likely it will probably only have a small number of regulars. Also, I have very little personal time to devote to managing site software (thus, the freelancer).

Thanks if you can help guide me!

Mike

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Hi Mike, the WP Discourse plugin is an interface between a Discourse forum and a WordPress website. To use it you still need to install Discourse. Your developer can probably do that for you, there are instructions to do that here, and some support is available on this forum if they run into trouble. You can also get the Discourse team to set up a forum for you: https://payments.discourse.org/buy/ - check out the $99 one-time-install option.

The wp-discourse plugin is being developed with the support of the Discourse team, they wrote the first version of it and then hired me to do some work on it. If I’m not working on it, I’m pretty sure someone else will take it over.

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Thanks greatly Simon, that answers my questions!

I really like it for forums. But only as a user… I don’t know anything about web development. :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks so much for your quick, on-target reply!