If you run a Discourse forum next to your Ghost site, your members will soon be able to sign in to it with their Ghost account, and their paid tier will decide what they can see there. You'll connect the two from your Magic Pages customer portal, with nothing to install.
It's free, with no extra cost on top of your plan. If you don't run a forum, nothing changes for you.
Why we changed our minds
In December 2024, someone asked on the Ghost forum whether Magic Pages would offer Discourse on Ghost, the add-on that connects the two today. Jannis said no: it's a separate application that needs its own server, and we host Ghost.
That add-on still means running a server of your own, with a Ghost API key and webhooks for your site. What changed is on our side. In the last few weeks, we have built a lot of foundational tools in our network stack, which makes things like these very easy to implement.
Ghost deliberately doesn't do forums, and Ghost's own community forum runs on Discourse. It's the obvious one to connect first.
What you'll be able to do
When members click "Log in" on your forum, they go through your Ghost site. If they're already signed in there, they're straight back on the forum. If not, they sign in with Ghost first.
Every paid tier becomes a group in Discourse, so you can open a category to one tier and keep it closed to everyone else. Members join their group when they sign in. When they upgrade, downgrade or cancel, the forum catches up on its next check, which runs every five minutes.
You decide what happens to someone's forum account when they're deleted in Ghost: suspend it, anonymize it, delete it or leave it alone. And if you want to pause forum sign-in for a while, one switch does it and keeps everything else set up.
What you'll need
Your own Discourse forum. We connect it, we don't host it. It can be one you run yourself, or one hosted by Discourse on their Pro plan or above, because their cheaper plans don't allow members to sign in through another site.
To connect it, you paste an API key from your Discourse admin into your portal, and two settings from your portal into Discourse. We store the key encrypted and never show it again after you save it. There's no Ghost API key to hand over.
What happens next
It'll be available as a beta in the coming weeks. If you'd like to try it early, reply to this email.
