I confirmed on a test site that clicking the button does create a new topic, so clearly I am not understanding what the Javascript articleId variable really is doing.

Can anyone shed any light on that? I can cope with the button creating the topic, but I do need to know what role the articleId plays in the process. I'm using this plugin to power comments on virtual pages, pages that don't actually exist as separate Wordpress pages, so I don't have a post id to use.

Does the articleId need to be a unique value? Must it be an integer? What's the legal range of it?

Edit: For anyone doing something similar to what I'm doing, here are the answers:

The articleId must be unique, the plugin establishes a mapping between it and a new topic id. There does not appear to be a way to tie a Wordpress article to an existing topic.

The articleId does not need to be an integer, as long as you use quotes it can be any string. It's solely used to find the topic id in NodeBB.

So if you're using it like I am, for virtual pages that don't actually exist in Wordpress, you can safely coexist with comments on normal Wordpress pages by using an alphanumeric unique id for the virtual articleIds.

You need to click the publish button before comment box shows up.

What does the publish button do, exactly? I had been assuming it created the topic in NodeBB. But if the topic already exists, what does publish do?

I have a possibly unusual use case that shows I probably don't understand how NodeBB integration is working with this plugin. I'm on Wordpress.

Here's what I thought happened: the plugin uses the Wordpress article id to use to create a new NodeBB topic with that same id when the Publish button is pressed. Afterward, since the topic already exists, you see the posts and comment form instead of the Publish button.

My use case is that the topic already exists (it was created in NodeBB) and I'm trying to tie a Wordpress post to it. I'm using the general approach and setting nodebb.articleID to the NodeBB topic id.

What I expected was to see the comment box and current posts in that topic. What I'm seeing instead is the Publish button.

Am I misunderstanding how things should be working?