Premium WordPress Integration

prosurfer

I'm interested in moving to Flarum and purchasing this plugin. I love that it shows a forum discussion under the news story! Perhaps this is too specific of a question, but I was wondering if there would be further integration features in the future. For example, are there any plans to allow a list of the latest topics to be shown in an iframe on the front page of a Wordpress site? That way we could draw in users to the forum and making topics from the front page.

clarkwinkelmann

prosurfer absolutely! It's been a while since I've added new features (apart from compatibility with more login plugins) but I'm planning to add more!

You're thinking of showing regular Flarum discussions, not those created by Wordpress, is that correct?

Technically this wouldn't require to be a Wordpress-specific feature if it works with an iframe. The same iframe could be used by any website that wants to showcase their forum.

What I could do is implement this kind of feature as a Wordpress widget to make it one-click, and maybe cache the data in Wordpress so it can be immediately rendered. I'll add this to my list of ideas 👍️

hrvoje_hr

prosurfer For example, are there any plans to allow a list of the latest topics to be shown in an iframe on the front page of a Wordpress site?

You can do that using RSS, you can display discussions in any order from any tag anywhere on your WP site.

prosurfer

Thank you for the quick response! Yes, showing regular Flarum discussions on the Wordpress front page.

Also another question. My website is currently using an old Xenforo and Wordpress integration plugin. Our Wordpress login is only used for news writers and editors, which is a small group of people compared to the thousands of users we have on Xenforo. For your plugin, would every single forum user get a Wordpress account? Or is your plugin setup in a way where most users just use Flarum and then if they want to integrate with their Wordpress accounts they can?

clarkwinkelmann

prosurfer with my extension, Wordpress becomes a new social login option. You can then decide if you want it to be the only option, or to keep other login options (regular Flarum password login). You can even use FoF OAuth and other Flarum social logins together with Wordpress login. But I know most customers use Wordpress as their main account or they have an existing userbase from when they used Wordpress comments so they usually add social login directly to Wordpress, and then make Wordpress the only login method for Flarum.

The extension will not automatically create Wordpress users. If you make Wordpress the only login method and the users don't have a Wordpress account, they will have to create one manually first. They will then automatically be connected to the existing Flarum account that shares the same email.

If you only want to enable Wordpress login for convenience for your writers, I would suggest keeping the regular Flarum login for your other users. You could use custom CSS and/or Linguist extension to hide, move or rename the Wordpress login button to say "Writer login" or something like that. The Wordpress login is not required to comment on the Flarum comment threads for the Wordpress posts.

I hope this clears things up! Don't hesitant to ask if you need more details.

prosurfer

clarkwinkelmann

Sorry I guess I'm still a bit confused. Right now I have an active forum with a bunch of users and we also have a separate Wordpress installation for maybe 20 writers. I guess my questions are:

Does this plugin link the 20 Wordpress users to their corresponding Flarum accounts? So that when they create news stories in Wordpress, the discussion threads are created under their Flarum accounts?
Do regular forum users need to know this integration exists? It doesn't make Wordpress accounts for them, right?
Do regular users need to do anything to be able to post under the Wordpress stories, other than be logged in to their Flarum accounts?

I guess I just need this plugin to link the few Wordpress accounts to the corresponding Flarum accounts, to host a Flarum discussion under the Wordpress news story, and for Flarum users to be able to comment with their Flarum accounts without ever touching a Wordpress account or login.

clarkwinkelmann

prosurfer the two features offered by my extension are currently 100% separated.

The "Comments integration" automatically syncs all posts made on Wordpress to Flarum. Users post comments using their Flarum accounts. Every user interaction happens on the Flarum side. An iframe allows browsing the comments from the Wordpress posts, but that's still just Flarum being embedded. The authors of the Wordpress posts don't even need to be registered on Flarum for this feature to work. All discussions are created under a single Flarum username which you can configure in the extension settings (by default it's the admin user, but you can create a "virtual" user to use instead if you prefer).

The "Login integration" configures Wordpress as a social login for Flarum, and nothing else. If your users are not doing anything that requires being connected to Wordpress, you don't have to use this feature.

I am planning to add a feature where the real post author on Wordpress could be synced as the discussion author in Flarum, but this is not implemented at this time.

linc

clarkwinkelmann I am planning to add a feature where the real post author on Wordpress could be synced as the discussion author in Flarum

Have you considered having WordPress users connect from Flarum instead of vice-versa? I once built this for Vanilla Forums, but I readily admit it had some limitations, like requiring they be on the same domain for cookie access, because it wasn't proper SSO. Anyway, this seems more like @prosurfer's use case and is how I'd want to use a CMS with my community.

prosurfer

Thank you, I understand now!

One more question: is there a way to display the # of Flarum comments in the Wordpress layout, like on the front page of a Wordpress site under each news story?

hrvoje_hr

prosurfer yes, you can check how everything works on my site:
https://ffa.hr/

It's in local language, but translator will help you.

clarkwinkelmann

prosurfer yes it should automatically work with most themes. If your Wordpress theme doesn't show the comment count, you can reach out and I will try to fix it. I am overriding the original comment count value from Wordpress so most themes will just display that value like they would for native comments.

JohnP

prosurfer If you are looking for another example showing comment counts in WP then we are doing it on Eko Diena (not updated with a new WP article or much forum activity recently, but I plan to change that).

If you scroll down the front page a bit then you can see we are also pulling the latest forum topics on to the WP page. I created a shortcode to do it, and am happy to send you the code snippet we are using if you like.

clarkwinkelmann

linc Have you considered having WordPress users connect from Flarum instead of vice-versa?

This could definitely be added. The current use case was mostly existing communities already on Wordpress who were adding Flarum, so it made sense to keep the Wordpress login flow and the account edit the users were used to. But for completely new communities, it would be conceivable to do the opposite.

linc but I readily admit it had some limitations, like requiring they be on the same domain for cookie access, because it wasn't proper SSO

My current implementation also has some limitations for cross-domain, since it's also cookie based. Implementing the reverse login wouldn't add any more complexity in that regard.

petejacobson

what is the error "Cannot enable Wordpress Integration until the following dependencies are enabled: Lock" referring to?

luceos

petejacobson you need to enable the Flarum Lock extension.

petejacobson

thanks @luceos I somehow got past that. Generally seems to be working amazingly except for certain situations where i get a "too many redirects" on the WP login popup.

This whole project has been... interesting... since I inherited a highly customized beta version with zero updates since 2020. Still figuring it out but looking pretty good and running well on v1.5

luceos

petejacobson a highly customized beta version with zero updates since 2020.

That surely won't be an easy job. We are for all questions you might have.

petejacobson

Thanks @luceos

Any idea why I might get the "too many redirects" issue? I'm running Flarum in a directory under WP. ( /chats/flarum/).

Also, I've been fiddling with things quite a bit and the Admin user ID setting seems out of sync. WP user ID should be 10 but is 1, and it so happens there is another WP admin user 1. So although I am logging into WP as user 10, and it is logging me in to Flarum, it's logging me into Flarum as WP user with ID of 1, and I can't find where in the db to update that.

Pretty sure the cause of the problem is me editing or reloading the database many times...

clarkwinkelmann

petejacobson you can check my extension page in the Flarum admin panel to get the health report. It should catch any issue with the configuration of URLs, at least when it comes to Flarum and Wordpress communicating together.

If there's only a redirect issue with the Wordpress login page, maybe it's related to your http->https or www<->no-www redirect? If the health check in Flarum is green, it shouldn't be related to the login part.

The "Admin user ID" in my extension settings is the Flarum user ID. It's not important if the ID is assigned to a different user in Wordpress. In fact you don't even need to have any user with the same email in Wordpress, it can be any user that's an admin in the Flarum database. If you need to change it via the database it's found in wp_options=>kilowhat_flarum_user_id in WP database.

The mapping of Flarum and Wordpress accounts is entirely based on IDs. If you get connected to the wrong account after using the SSO feature, can you check if the 2 accounts have the same email?

hrvoje_hr

After updating Flarum to 1.6.1 and Wordpress Intergration to 1.7.4 on the Wordpress side, now the whole Flarum is embeded instead of just discussion comments.

clarkwinkelmann

hrvoje_hr can you share more details? Do you mean links to other pages inside of the comments iframe open inside of the iframe instead of the parent page? I'm not experiencing this issue on my test forum.

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