Wordpress integration/Plugin

[omiebi]

Hello everyone, is it possible to embed a Wordpress site on my self hosted discourse community?

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey @omiebi, welcome to Discourse Meta.

The best way to work with both Wordpress and Discourse is to have Wordpress and Discourse on separate servers (i.e. at different web addresses), and connect them using the WP Discourse Plugin. Please check out the introduction to the WP Discourse Plugin here:

WP Discourse Plugin Installation and Setup

To get started with the WP Discourse Plugin, go through each of these topics in order and watch the videos at the top of the topic. Install the plugin Connect to Discourse Set up Publishing Set up Commenting Set up DiscourseConnect The two main plugin features, Publishing and DiscourseConnect don’t have to be used together. You can just set up Publishing (and Commenting), and not use DiscourseConnect, or just set up DiscourseConnect, or set up both. There’s a short description of each feature…

[jimkleiber]

Another way, if you just want to access the Wordpress site within Discourse, would be to embed it with an iframe. I think you also have to make sure you put the domain of the WP site in the allowed iframes admin setting.

There’s also an option to publish a Discourse topic as a page, which could help you make that iframe its own separate page within Discourse.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

@jimkleiber

There’s also an option to publish a Discourse topic as a page, which could help you make that iframe its own separate page within Discourse.

You could technically do this, but I would advise considering other options first

[jimkleiber]

Haha I assumed you might but I’m not sure what are the main downsides. The upsides would be having only one place for people to visit, at least in my case, where the WP is almost a shadow site that people mostly just see embedded in the Discourse site.

What are some of the downsides of this?

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

There’s a short answer and a long answer to this.

The short answer is that

1. Lots of things break using an entire site in an iframe, particularly with a pluggable system like Wordpress (like they do in Discourse), and

2. In my experiencing working with this kind of request over the years the upside that people typically perceive in doing something like this is pretty illusory. A site admin often feels it’s “neater” to have a “single place” so to speak, however their users don’t typically either notice or care.

In about 7 years of responding to this kind of request from clients I have yet to come across a situation when it actually makes sense to use an iframe. In most cases the better way of making Wordpress and Discourse feel like they’re part of the same “site” is to use a common header.

[omiebi]

Thanks @jimkleiber and @angus . So i am basically trying to drive traffic to both platforms. I want the visitors on the discourse community to always see the embedded page of the WordPress site and vice versa.

[jimkleiber]

Ah, then I’ll take your word for it for now and keep them separate and see how it goes. Thanks!