The discussion revolves around integrating a WordPress-based ecommerce store with Discourse. shawaj wants to set up Discourse on a subfolder (e.g., mysite.com/forum) and use WordPress for Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities. benword confirms that Discourse supports subfolder installation as of 1.3 beta and the WordPress plugin can handle SSO.
shawaj expresses a preference for a subfolder setup over a subdomain and asks about the implications on user experience and SEO. codinghorror confirms official support for running Discourse in a subfolder.
However, codinghorror notes that this setup requires a forward proxy like Fastly, which increases costs and complexity. This setup also requires sharing Fastly credentials and routing all traffic through Fastly. HAWK inquires about the feasibility of making this change before going live.
I am super interested in using discourse alongside a wordpress based ecommerce store.
Ideally I would like to have it on a domain like mysite.com/forum and also have it so that wordpress can handle the SSO capability (mainly because I already have around 2500 users on the wordpress instance).
Is this kind of thing possible using the wordpress plugin, and if so what is the best way to install it?
The wordpress instance is running on Apache.
Having the wordpress comments somehow connected to discourse would also be useful, but not essential.
Discourse supports installing to a subfolder as of 1.3 beta & the WordPress plugin can handle SSO.
Having the wordpress comments somehow connected to discourse would also be useful, but not essential.
Not sure what you mean by connected, but the plugin lets you create a new post on your Discourse when publishing a post on WordPress. It then displays (based on your settings) the discussion from the Discourse thread that was automatically created from the WP plugin.
Maybe I am just being stupid, but I like the idea of mysite.com/forum rather than forum.mysite.com but I guess that is just personal preference because the rest of our site is on subfolders not subdomains.
Does it make much difference from a user experience point of view?
What are the extra costs involved and is it as complicated as we discussed a couple of weeks back? (ie is it feasible for us to make that change now before going live?)
It requires a forward proxy like Fastly that can redirect all traffic from a sub folder to a different server (ours). It is significantly more expensive and complex.
It also requires us to share your Fastly credentials and all your traffic must route through Fastly.