Discourse is a popular and powerful open source discussion forum software. Memberful integrates directly with Discourse, making it easy to create a members-only discussion forum.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the steps to integrate your Discourse forum with Memberful.If you’re new to Discourse, read the official Discourse install tutorial to get started.
Navigate to Content → Community → Discourse in your Memberful dashboard, and click Connect.Enter information about your Discourse site including the API key you just generated. The Username and Email must be for the Discourse admin.
To limit access to specific Discourse categories based on your members’ plans:
Go to Content → Community → Discourse.
Click Edit settings.
Choose which membership plans should be linked to which Discourse groups.
When you’re finished, click Update settings to save your changes.
Keep in mind that these setting doesn’t apply to members who registered for free.Once everything is set up, active members will automatically be added to their assigned Discourse group after they sign in through Memberful.
If a member’s subscription expires, they’ll be removed from the associated Discourse group — even if they still have a Discourse account.
To leverage the Discourse Groups you’ve set up, you’ll need to change the security settings on your Discourse Categories.Click a Discourse Category and then click the edit Wrench icon.
Navigate to the Security settings, click Add a group and select the Discourse Group.
After choosing your new Discourse Group, select the See / Reply / Create settings and click the Save Category to add this security setting.Repeat the process for all other members-only Categories.
You’ll notice that the Uncategorized Category does not have a Security tab. You can disable posting to the Uncategorized Category by visiting Admin → Settings → Posting.
We have a security setting that doesn’t allow Memberful non-admins to be Discourse admins. This is necessary because we don’t confirm email address ownership. The solution is to create your Discourse admins as Memberful staff. Navigate to Settings → Staff from your Memberful dashboard to set up staff.
We use the member login page for SSO since the vast majority of Discourse users are members. If you want to access your Discourse forum as an admin, make sure to sign in to your Memberful dashboard first.
If you set a paying member as a Discourse admin, we will remove the admin flag the next time we sync the member. This is to protect your Discourse admin account. However, we don’t touch the Moderator flag, so your paying members can be Discourse moderators.
When SSO is enabled, Discourse will show a login button but no signup button. To add a signup link to your Discourse discussion forum, create a Memberful plan, copy the plan purchase link, and add it to your website or forum. Or customize your Discourse header to include the link.
When you disable our Discourse integration, we try to disable Memberful Single Sign On (SSO) on your forum. Once the integration is successfully disabled, you (and your members) will be able to log in to the forum normally.If you are unable to log in to your forum after you’ve disabled our integration, log in via this URL to fix your Discourse settings:
