WP Discourse Embed Plugin

[techAPJ (Arpit Jalan)]

I just published a new WordPress plugin to embed Discourse comments using Discourse Embed code.

techAPJ/wp-discourse-embed

This WordPress plugin injects the Discourse embed code in blog posts, allowing you to use Discourse as community engine.

It takes two options:

Discourse URL should be the URL of your Discourse instance, this field is required.

Embed Discourse comments on posts published after date is an optional field, if provided only blog posts published after the date you specified will use Discourse comments (hiding the original WordPress comments). Blog posts published before the provided date will use original WordPress comments.

That’s it once you have activated the plugin and provided Discourse URL, you should start seeing Discourse comments embedded under your blog posts!

If you want to show comment count under each topic on blog front page, then add this HTML snippet (in your theme index file) under topic markup:

<a href="<?php permalink_link(); ?>#discourse-comments">Discussion</a>

The above snippet will show as:

Discussion (8 replies)

Where 8 is the reply posts count for that particular topic.

This plugin also adds author nickname in meta tag, like:

<meta name="author" content="techapj">

Where techapj is WP nickname of post author.

This plugin assumes that you have already configured embedding settings as instructed here.

Download the plugin, and start contributing! – GitHub - techAPJ/wp-discourse-embed: WordPress plugin that lets you use Discourse as the community engine for a WordPress blog

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

How is this plugin different from wp-discourse? They literally have the same introductory description, which is very confusing.

This WordPress plugin allows you to use Discourse as a community engine for your WordPress blog.

I guess it has something to do with how wp-discourse requires API access, whereas wp-discourse-embed is “lower commitment” with no API key needed, working more like the “paste-and-you’re-done” type of embedding you get from the likes of Disqus. Sound about right?

Would definitely appreciate more clarification though. What are the different use cases? What’s the overlap (do they have the same strategy for styling comments?).

If this could work like Reddit embeds, that’d be super cool. As in:

1. I write a blog post
2. I announce the blog post on a DIscourse forum like Meta
3. I embed my Discourse topic into my blogpost, effectively using Discourse for comments without hosting it myself.

[techAPJ (Arpit Jalan)]

How is this plugin different from wp-discourse?

The wp-discourse-embed plugin uses the Discourse Embed code. Here are the pros and cons as compared to wp-discourse plugin:

Pros:

• Requires minimal configuration
• Comments HTML is auto created, so styling is not required.
• Can enable Discourse comments only on posts published after specified date.

Cons:

• Not much customizable, hence less features.
• Comments HTML can not be styled as per the theme.

wp-discourse-embed is basically a WordPress plugin for:

Embedding Discourse Comments via Javascript

Discourse has the ability to embed the comments from a topic in a remote site using a Javascript API that creates an IFRAME. For an example of this in action, check out Coding Horror’s blog. The blog is run via Ghost but the comments are embedded from his Discourse forum. One important thing to note with this setup is that users have to navigate to your forum to post replies. This is intentional, as we feel that the posting interface on a Discourse forum is currently much richer than what we co…

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I embed my Discourse topic into my blogpost, effectively using Discourse for comments without hosting it myself.

This is not possible because the blog hostname should be present in Admin > Customize > Embedding.

[techAPJ (Arpit Jalan)]

To fix published date and author for topics linked to old WP posts see:

Fix published date and author for topics created via wp-discourse-embed plugin

I recently installed wp-discourse-embed plugin on Quarter to Three WordPress blog. As soon as I installed the plugin there was an influx of new topics being created for existing (old) WP posts. I ran this rake task to fix the published date and author for topics that are linked to old WP posts: desc "Fetch WP data" task "users:fetch_wp_data" => [:environment] do puts "Fetching WP data" i = 0 TopicEmbed.find_each do |topic_embed| begin html = open(topic_embed.embed_url).read …

[Quintin_Par]

Hi @techAPJ,

Where do I set the discourse URL? I don’t see this setting after installing the plugin.

[Tjeef]

Does it work on a private forum?

[jtbayly]

I see you opened a new topic over here:

Mix of Wordpress blog comments, public and hidden Discourse threads?

I have been searching around, and not being able to find a clear answer to this. (Partly maybe also because I am not so familiar with the Discourse terminology yet). I am assessing usecases in the hope that Discourse can support them.). (I have seen the terms public/hidden categories as well as public/private forum used - I am not sure what applies here. I have also seen a comment somewhere that the WP-Discourse plugin could not handle a “private forum”. I am not sure if that is needed here - b…