Adding your PeerBoard discussion board to your WordPress site is very simple. This guide covers the installation and set-up steps.
Plugin installation
Follow the steps below to install the WordPress plugin:
- Open your WordPress admin panel. It's usually located at yourwebsite.com/wp-admin.
- Navigate to the Plugins page
- Click on Add New button.
- In the search field, enter “PeerBoard”.
- Find the PeerBoard plugin and select Install then Activate.
And you're done!
You should be redirected to a management interface for the plugin. Whenever you need to change WordPress-specific settings, like the board path, navigate to the newly-added PeerBoard tab in your admin panel.
If this method doesn't work for you, try downloading the latest version of the plugin from the WordPress online repository. You'll need to download it as a zip and install it manually.
Connecting an existing board
If you host your discussion board on a PeerBoard subdomain and want to connect it to your WordPress site, follow the guidance above to install the plugin and then take the following steps:
- From your existing board, go to Settings > Hosting.
- Copy and paste the content of the "Auth token" field into the corresponding field in the PeerBoard settings area in WordPress. Hit Save.
The auth token is a unique identifier that will load your boards in WordPress.
💡 Note: Following the steps above will automatically change your board's domain to your WordPress domain, which you can configure from the WordPress settings interface.
💡 Note: If you use different emails for your PeerBoard account and your WordPress administrator account, you will have access to two admin accounts. We automatically create a WordPress admin account for your board on connecting.
WordPress plugin settings
There are several options for configuring the WordPress plugin (through your WordPress dashboard) that complement the internal settings accessible within your PeerBoard account.
Here's a quick overview:
- Auth token - Used to identify and securely connect to your board.
- Board path - The URL for your discussion board on your site. You can change it to anything, including an empty field to move it to the main page.
- Automatically import WordPress usernames for logged-in users - If this option is checked, we will pick up the first and last names of users logged into your WordPress account.
- Activate automatic member import - By default, members are added to PeerBoard when they sign up through the community page. But you can also automatically add them (and subscribe them to community digests) whenever they sign up through your WordPress site. We've found that this feature increases member adoption significantly.
Integrating with your membership plugin
The WordPress plugin automatically tracks user sessions for members logged into your WordPress site.
You may want to redirect anonymous visitors to your native login page. Otherwise, we open our own login screen by default.
To do this, go to Settings > SSO your PeerBoard account and set the External login URL to the web address you want visitors to use instead of our login screen.
Public and private communities
By default, your board is publicly visible to anybody on the internet. If you have native WordPress registrations, they will be picked up by our system.
If you're not using any third-party plugins to gate your community's content, you can set it to private by going to Settings > General and changing the access settings.
You can also use any third-[arty membership plugin for WordPress. We will automatically pick up the details of registered members and log them into the board if they have access to the page.
Finally, you can gate some parts of your community via our User Groups feature.
Last thoughts
Please ask any questions about this integration in our WordPress Questions section. If you experience any bugs, post in Bug reports.