What it is

WP Discourse is a WordPress plugin that acts as an interface between a WordPress site and a Discourse community. It lives in the WordPress plugin ecosystem and is written in PHP, distributed under the GPL-3.0 license. The plugin does not install or bundle Discourse itself; a Discourse forum must already exist before the integration will work. The two applications communicate through the Discourse API, which means the blog and the forum can run on separate servers, and the project documentation strongly recommends hosting them separately because their hosting requirements differ considerably.

The concrete problem it solves is comment management. A WordPress blog that wants threaded, moderation-aware discussion normally has to either rely on a hosted third-party commenting service or build something itself. WP Discourse instead routes discussion to a Discourse forum: when a new blog post is published, a corresponding forum topic is created automatically, and replies from that topic can be embedded back into the WordPress post. The plugin is explicitly not positioned as a substitute for Disqus-like commenting systems, and it cannot import old WordPress comments as Discourse replies.

Key capabilities

• Automatically creates a Discourse forum topic for discussion whenever a new blog post is published.
• Associates WordPress author accounts with their respective Discourse accounts without requiring DiscourseConnect.
• Embeds forum replies inside the WordPress blog post, with display selectable by post score and commenter trust level.
• Provides optional DiscourseConnect functionality so WordPress can act as the single-sign-on provider for a Discourse forum.
• Allows the HTML templates used for publishing posts to Discourse and for rendering comments on WordPress to be customized in the theme via filters.
• Supports running WordPress and Discourse on separate hosts, since all integration goes through the Discourse API.

Who uses it and how

• Blogs that want forum-based discussion rather than on-site comments use it to push each published post into a Discourse topic.
• Publishers running WordPress for content and Discourse for community use the embedding feature to surface selected replies beneath the original article.
• Sites with existing large-scale WordPress user management enable DiscourseConnect so WordPress becomes the identity provider and Discourse's native login flow is overridden.
• Theme developers hook into the template filters to customize how posts and comments are rendered.
• Deployments such as blog.discourse.org and boingboing.net run the plugin in production.

Getting started

Installation is available through the WordPress dashboard by searching for "WP Discourse" under Plugins > Add New, by downloading the plugin and uploading the wp-discourse directory to /wp-content/plugins/, or with Composer via composer require discourse/wp-discourse ~1.3.2. The plugin requires PHP 5.4.0 or higher.

When to use it — and when not to

This is the right choice when a Discourse forum is already part of the plan and the goal is to make it the community layer for a WordPress blog, particularly for sites that need WordPress to serve as the single-sign-on provider. A self-hoster must operate a WordPress installation and a separate Discourse instance, since the plugin installs neither; the two are best kept on different servers. The evident limitations are that existing WordPress comments cannot be migrated into Discourse

composer require discourse/wp-discourse ~1.3.2

{
  "require": {
    "php": ">=5.4.0",
    "discourse/wp-discourse": "~1.3.2"
  }
}