Integrating Discourse and Wordpress: easy peasey or hell no?

April 5, 2016 8:10 AM

Would like to integrate Discourse forums into a Wordpress blog hosted by Dreamhost.

I think this might wind up being a very brief series of answers: it looks like Discourse has specific hosting requirements and they route you toward their hosting solution. Since I'm already on Dreamhost, and since moving the site would be a technically heavy lift coupled with the Discourse installation, it looks like integrating these two isn't realistic for the amount of time I'm inclined to put in.

I'd love to be able to play with Discourse forums on my site, but it kind of looks like it's maybe beyond what I can realistically do without considerable effort.

I'm database literate, php literate, reasonably comfortable in CSS--but this looks like a lot of effort. Can anyone suggest a solution that isn't 'move my whole site off of Dreamhost to an unfamiliar hosting service'?

(I have Googled this but didn't get a lot of clarity out of the experience for some reason. Plus, I have another site on Dreamhost and then I'd be paying for two hosting services for two sites.)

Thankya.

posted by A Terrible Llama to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I'd say hell no. Discourse is a Ruby on Rails app, so its hosting requirements are going to be different than Wordpress. Maybe, if you were feeling ambitious, you could set up Dreamhost to serve both LAMP and RoR apps, but I don't know if they allow it. Plus then you'd have to consider trying to share an authentication system between two web apps that are written from fundamentally different points of view about app architecture. Maybe they both support OAuth, maybe they don't, the more I think about this the more I'm internally saying "nope"!

I'd recommend looking for a Wordpress forum plugin that is good enough instead.
posted by rachelpapers at 8:28 AM on April 5, 2016

Discourse has a WP Plugin, but it is only at 0.6.6 and isn't ready for prime time. Obviously, this isn't a trivial task, so trying to roll your own seems a non-starter.
posted by ssg at 8:58 AM on April 5, 2016