Wordpress Flarum Plugin

tankerkiller125

marcyustin https://discuss.flarum.org/d/21666-single-sign-on-sso-with-wordpress-integration works well with wordpress now in terms of logins

hrvoje_hr

I'm not a developer of it, but I know that one plugin is in development. I've had an opportunity to test it and it's really solid, better than Discourse. Before a release, it only remained to polish the comments section.

As I said, I'm not a developer of it and I hope the author will get to you all here soon.

clarkwinkelmann

hrvoje_hr we can let people know I'm developing it 😉 Some already know I believe.

So yes, for other people interested, my premium extension for Wordpress integration should be ready soon (now targeting this coming week). I'll create a discussion under Extensions here when ready. In terms of login integration, it goes a lot further than the existing open-source Wordpress login extension (it includes global logout for instance).

[deleted]

clarkwinkelmann how much ? 😀 Very interested in this

clarkwinkelmann

[deleted] You'll get all the details when I publish it 😉

ismail

When it will be ready

T0m

It would definitely need a way to import from BBPress too, to act as a replacement.

[deleted]

T0m See https://discuss.flarum.org/d/11005-bbpress-to-flarum-migration/3

raafirivero

I'm picking up this thread as the site I'm currently working on needs to do two things mentioned here. @clarkwinkelmann 's SSO plugin achieves some of the functionality but I'd like to ask the community how they might solve this problem, to see if Flarum is even a viable option for me.

The main thing is that I need for content aspects of WordPress to run alongside Flarum. For this reason, simply injecting block sections of HTML into using existing header/footer sections via Flarum plugins feels underpowered. The WordPress loop would need to run, for instance, in order to access custom post types and titles. A post in another topic here mentioned that running Flarum in an iFrame within another site is dangerous, but it feels like it may be the only way. I've built some version of the functionality I need for most of the site (or can solve them via WP plugins), and am basically looking at Flarum as a prettier/faster upgrade over BBPress, which runs the existing forum. And sucks, frankly, especially compared to Flarum.

Has anyone here achieved anything similar to the level of integration proposed in this drawing?

clarkwinkelmann

raafirivero Worpdress is a server-side-redered application powered by PHP. Flarum is a single page app powered by Mithril and javascript. If you want to have the full Wordpress and Flarum experience with a single identical interface, there will be no miracle. You'll have to develop everything twice.

Now if Flarum is only used for the purpose of commenting on posts, a combination of my Wordpress Comments integration and some additional code could make it so users never visit Flarum and only ever see Flarum inside the comments iframe. But this would require some code to move Flarum user preferences to Wordpress user settings and some additional code if you want notifications to show up in Wordpress.

Or you could embrace the two different platforms and provide a similar theme between the two apps, but not try applying every Wordpress customization to Flarum or vice-versa. I think it's common enough for websites to have a forum section that people will understand why the theme is different while browsing the forum or browsing the news or other content your website offers.

raafirivero

clarkwinkelmann Makes sense - most sites I know (a few WP ones) have the forum on a separate page/link, probably for this exact reason.

raafirivero

@clarkwinkelmann Reading up on Mithril now. Would it be possible to cache the output of wordpress into a flat html file stored somewhere on the server? - that way I could call blocks of content via javascript similar to ajax or more modern concepts? That way the entire page is run in a Flarum-style?

tankerkiller125

raafirivero Wordpress now has a JSON API you could call if you wanted https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/

clarkwinkelmann

raafirivero Would it be possible to cache the output of wordpress into a flat html file stored somewhere on the server?

Yes it's doable. But it might not be the most ideal solution nor the easiest to implement.

If the additional content to show is dynamic, a Mithril-based component hitting the Wordpress API as suggested by tankerkiller125 might be the best option.

It's important to also take into consideration the infinite scrolling behavior of Flarum. There might be no place to show thousands of pixels of height of injected content. You'll need to design that content to fit into Flarum somehow, which might mean re-writing the output from Wordpress anyway.

raafirivero

clarkwinkelmann my thought was to hit Flarum with the similar behaviors of the existing custom header/footer plugins, except injecting my WP content. It wouldn't be dynamic in the way you're thinking as the pixel heights would be known in advance. The actual content that fills out those blocks would change over time, of course.

raafirivero

OK so I've been able to successfully hit the WordPress JSON API via a Mithril component I'm writing and extract info - post titles, excerpts, links, etc - and insert them into my Flarum header as @tankerkiller125 suggested. (Yay!!). (And thanks for the initial pointers clarkwinkelmann ). The next question I have is somewhat philosophical: right now I have my entire WordPress install running on /{site}/public/blog/ - is it better to run WordPress "below" the public folder as Flarum runs? Or is it just fine where it is? And is there a way via, say, .htaccess to make sure that Flarum never interferes with anything on public/blog/* and higher? When I first got the install running it seemed like there were some weird issues. I'm basically trying to figure out the best way to keep them "quarantined" from each other, haha.

clarkwinkelmann

raafirivero is it better to run WordPress "below" the public folder as Flarum runs? Or is it just fine where it is?

I don't there's any better or worse here. Both will work fine. I'd recommend using different subdomains to completely prevent any interference though (for example with my not-optimal configuration on my demo website with Wordpress at / and Flarum at /forum, some of the error pages are answered by Wordpress when they should be by Flarum)

raafirivero /{site}/public/blog/

If that "public" in the URL is the public folder of Flarum, you need to fix your configuration to make public the DocumentRoot or follow https://flarum.org/docs/install.html#customizing-paths to hide the sensitive Flarum files. The Flarum Lab can help check the configuration.

Are you using one of the available Flarum-Wordpress extension or just building on your own ?

raafirivero

clarkwinkelmann No worries - I installed Flarum in the bottom (non-public) folder of the site and made "public" the DocumentRoot as recommended by the install manual.

clarkwinkelmann Are you using one of the available Flarum-Wordpress extension or just building on your own ?

I haven't tried any of the available extensions yet as I'm building all of the components I need one-by-one. SSO, etc. is on the menu of things I need to attack, of course, but I'm not there yet. (also migrating data, which will be... yeah, don't want to get ahead of myself yet). For the moment the goal is to see if I can get all the content I want on the homepage. Next up is to figure out oEmbed for the videos sprinkled through the page.

clarkwinkelmann I'd recommend using different subdomains to completely prevent any interference

Will try the subdomain idea if my build gets wonky.

Two more vaguely philosophical questions:

Should I build a custom JSON endpoint within wordpress so that I only have to ping its API once and can load it with all the content I need, or is it more efficient to have a few bite-sized API calls that happen throughout the page?
Is it better for performance to have WordPress cache a flat text file in .JSON format and source content from there? Or have it come up with the content on-demand? I know this isn't strictly-speaking a Flarum question but I have no idea what Mithril prefers to work with. I've gotten both techniques to work on my dev server but since everything's just running on my laptop the speed differences are negligible.

What I like about attempting this is that it's teaching me new things about how the web works. I still suck at this part. But it's fun.

clarkwinkelmann

raafirivero if the data is needed for each page load and rarely changes, I'd suggest Flarum pull the data and cache it (via a scheduled command for example), then returns it along with the preloaded data for the single page app. You can keep direct AJAX requests to Wordpress for the really dynamic data but use preloaded data without any additional request for most of the mostly-not-changing data.

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