Wp-discourse-shortcodes plugin

I’m trying to replicate this in a floating widget bar with the dividers. What shortcode combo should I be going for? For reference, see here. Click on the first circle from the bottom left.

EDIT: Here is the answer! I needed to (1) use the shortcode [discourse_topics tile=true excerpt_length=55 username_position=bottom], (2) enable “Use Default Styles” under “WP Discourse Shortcodes Settings,” (3) “Clear Cache” under “WP Discourse Shortcodes Settings,” and (4) clear the cache by disabling and enabling LiteSpeed Cache (only applicable if you are using LiteSpeed Cache plugin).

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Ever since I added the shortcodes plugin a few months ago, at first, I thought it was something I did but I believe the plugin has caused the following warning to be displayed in the Discourse admin panel. Please fix. Thanks!

We detected an API request using a deprecated authentication method. Please update it to use header based auth. After updating this message may take 24 hours to disappear.

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Yes, that warning is being generated because of the wp-discourse-shortcodes-plugin. For now it is just a warning and won’t affect your site’s functionality. I’ll update the plugin to fix the way it is authenticating API requests and post on here when that’s been done.

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I’ve pushed version 0.24 of the plugin to its GitHub repo. All API calls made by the plugin are now using header based authentication. If you have been seeing the “We detected an API request using a deprecated authentication method” warning on your Discourse dashboard, updating to verion 0.24 should make the warning go away within 24 hours.

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@simon - Hi Simon,

Just wanted to confirm that this plugin will continue to be actively developed/supported as we plan to install on a live, production site alongside wp-discourse this week. We are more than happy to contribute to the development as well so please let me know how we can do that. Thanks.

I will continue to support the plugin with bug/security fixes until there is a good replacement for it. I don’t think I’ll be adding any new features to the current plugin.

Thanks for asking, but the plugin is totally free. I could be interested in code contributions to the plugin though. If anyone is interested in working on it or in developing a similar plugin that is designed to work with the WordPress Block Editor, please send me a PM on Meta. I think it’s important to have good integration between Discourse and WordPress sites.

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@simon:

Great. Thanks. Does that mean as Discourse is upgraded, this plugin will be upgraded in kind (no new features, but upgrades that may be necessary to remain compatible with the latest version of Discourse)?

Thanks, by the way, for your ongoing contributions to extending the capabilities between Discourse and WP. Not an easy task and I’m sure time consuming.

Yes, if a Discourse update breaks the plugin, I will make the changes required to get the plugin to work with the update.

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Thanks @Simon_Cossar!

7 posts were split to a new topic: Unable to connect WordPress site to Discourse

Hi, i love this plugin made my life perfect for my site.

Was the category selection added, it would be so great is like select category=“news1” and then it would show those in a widget on the news page on wordpress.

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I don’t know if this is supported any further, but in case it is, I tried to install the plugin and got errors:

Pups::ExecError: cd /var/www/discourse/plugins && git clone https://github.com/scossar/wp-discourse-shortcodes failed with return #<Process::Status: pid 325 exit 128>

Location of failure: /pups/lib/pups/exec_command.rb:112:in `spawn'

Just passing along.

Ray

The WP Discourse Shortcodes plugin is a WordPress plugin, not a Discourse plugin, so trying to install it to Discourse would give you that error. You need to download the plugin’s zip file from the Github repo and then upload it to your WordPress site through the WordPress dashboard.

I’m moving away from focusing on WordPress development, so at some point I’d like to stop supporting this plugin, but i’ll keep supporting it until there’s a good replacement for it. I think the functionality that the plugin provides is useful. You can see it on a live site here: | Principles for Digital Development.

The plugin extends the WP Discourse plugin. When you install and activate it, a Shortcodes tab will be added to the WP Discourse options pages that gives you some options for configuring it:

Doh, silly mistake on my part. Understood on moving on, I also looked at the Embedding Topics you mentioned further up which may just do as well for what I need.

Thanks matey!
Ray

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Simon,

I’ve installed and activated the plugin as well as inserted the [discourse_latest] shortcode into a post (and sidebar) to see the output but nothing shows up. The shortcodes tab does show up in the WP Discourse settings page.

Is there something else I need to do?

Thanks and apologies for adding to your Wordpress misery ; )

Ray

I probably can’t test it today, but to be able to use a shortcode in a sidebar text widget, you usually need to add something like this to your theme:

add_filter( 'widget_text', 'do_shortcode' );

I’ll do some testing on the plugin early next week and also clean up this topic’s replies and the plugin’s readme file.

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I did try that for the widget, no go. It also doesn’t work directly in posts/pages either using the shortcode block editor.

I can confirm other shortcodes from other areas do work.

No rush at all, just holler my way if I can help any.

Thanks,
Ray

Any update on getting this to work? I’ve updated to the latest version but the shortcode still does not work on my site.

Thanks,
Ray

Work on this plugin has stopped for the moment. We have a new (excellent) outside contractor maintaining our WordPress plugin. I’ll post an announcement about that later this week. My own work on Discourse/WordPress integration is slowing down for the next while. If someone is interested in taking over maintenance of the wp-discourse-shortcodes plugin, get in touch with me. Since the plugin was developed prior to the introduction of the Block Editor, I’m not sure if the best approach would be to update the plugin to deal with WordPress blocks, or to start over with a new plugin that has similar functionality.

I understand, hopefully the new guy can help out as I really look forward to being able to show latest topics on the website to draw people into the forums.

BTW, is there a way to check if the shortcode is even being processed? On the pages I use it the shortcode text itself shows up as if it’s not a shortcode, i.e. it displays

[discourse_latest]

As the text on the page.

Ray