Discourse is a powerful tool that makes it easy to run and manage a patron-only community forum. Patreon has an integration with Discourse that automatically adds/removes patrons based on their membership access.
In this article, we’ll go over:
- How to set up your Discourse account
- How to set connect the Discourse integration with Patreon
- How do my patrons join Discourse?
Go to Discourse.org and click on the blue Try it FREE link. Then, select a plan for your 14-day trial and set up your account by entering the following information
- Email address
- Subdomain or domain. If you do not self-host your own domain, select the box next to “I need a temporary domain” and enter the subdomain you’d like to use. If you host your own domain, you can use that as well and it will be free.
- Community name (you can change this in the future!)
You’ll need a payment method in order to start the free trial. If you’ve entered your card details using Stripe in the past, this may prompt you to enter a code sent to your mobile phone. You can also enter your credit card details. Then click the ''Start your 14-day free trial'' button!
You will receive two email notifications from Discourse. The first one is to confirm that you've signed up for your trial. The second email will let you know once your Discourse instance is ready and will prompt you to set up a password. Please note that it may take a few minutes to get the second email as Discourse works to spin up your instance.
After setting your password, you’ll be taken to Discourse where you’ll go through these steps below to set up your community. Follow the steps on the screen and select Next after you complete each step.
Items to complete:
- Choose a language
- Add a community name – you can always edit this in the future.
- Add a description for your community – this is like your “elevator pitch” and will be the first thing that new arrivals to your community will read.
- Set your access – you can choose whether your community is public or private. If you choose public, everyone can access your forum even if they are not logged in. If you choose Private, only those logged in can find your forum. You have the option to create private categories for your patrons. You can also turn on the option to have people explicitly invited to your community. Please note that if you do this, you will have to send the invites to each person on your end.
- Contact information – this includes the email address for the person in charge of this community, general contact web page (for example, this could be your website or your Patreon page) and the user from which automated messages are sent).
- Organisation information – if you have a company, please enter your company name, governing law and city for disputes. If you don’t have a company, you can skip this step.
- Theme – select the colour theme, logos, icons, homepage format and emoji style you prefer to use for your community.
- Invite staff – if you have other individuals on your team that would need to moderate the community, you can invite them during this time as well.
When this is all complete, you’ll be prompted to a page that says “Your Discourse is Ready!” Select done then you’ll be taken to your Community page.
Now that you’ve got your community set up, you will need to connect it to Patreon.
To start, select the burger menu in the top right corner then select Admin > Plugins. Scroll down then select the settings icon next to “Discourse-Patreon”. Make sure you keep this tab open. You will return to it in a few steps.
In a separate browser window, enter the following URL: http://patreon.com/portal/registration/register-clients
Click the “Create Client” button and enter your app name and description. You’re also going to enter your Redirect URI. To get your Redirect URI, go back to the browser window with Discourse open and copy your Discourse URL with subdomain (https://yoursubdomain.trydiscourse.com).
Paste this URL into the “Redirect URIs” field then add “/auth/patreon/callback so that the entire redirect URI displays like this: https://yoursubdomain.trydiscourse.com/auth/patreon/callback
Then click “Create Client” button and you’ll find your app name and client ID. Select the down-arrow icon to open up a menu that displays all of your client info.
Now you are going to copy/paste your client info back to your Discourse plugin settings.
***Please note that you are going to go back and forth between the browser windows with Discourse and Patreon open, so you may want to keep them side-by-side.***
Copy and paste the following from the Patreon client page into the corresponding Discourse fields:
- Patron Client ID
- Patron Client Secret
- Patreon Webhook Secret
- Patreon Creator Access Token
- Patreon Creator Refresh token
Remember to select the green arrow next to each field to save!
Now, navigate to this URL: https://yoursubdomain.trydiscourse.com/admin/plugins/patreon then select “Update Patreon Data and Sync Groups.” A pop-up will populate and it will confirm that new data has been downloaded. Refresh the page and select OK.
To check how a patron would join our Discourse forum, follow these steps below.
Open an incognito tab and paste your Discourse community URL and select the With Patreon button to log in using your Patreon credentials.
Open an incognito tab and paste your Discourse community URL and select the With Patreon button to log in using your Patreon credentials.
Enter your login information and select allow when you are taken to the Oauth window. If your patron doesn't have a Discourse account, they will be asked to create one at this point.
Your patron will then be taken to your Discourse community homepage.