Top 4 WordPress Forums Plugins

Forums in WordPress have traditionally been pretty hard to get right, and even harder to integrate smoothly. In earlier WordPress versions, forum plugins were virtually non existant. Fortunately the need for discussion and drive for talk has changed this and there are now several vibrant plugins for WordPress that allow forum integration, as well as many plugins and mods for other forum software like PHPBB and SMF that allow almost seamless user integration. Here are a review of some of the better WordPress Forum plugins.

4. XDForum

While this project is no longer maintained, it’s still a pretty good, simple forum system for WordPress. It feels alot like vBulletin and PHPBB but is much faster and smaller. XDForum has a good design and layout and has good theme functionality. As good as it looks though, it has a few problems. It has ugly permalinks and commonly has problems with URLs returning 404s. If you need a quick and simple solution though, this will do fine.

http://www.xdweb.net/wordpress/xdforum2/

3. WP-Forum

WP-Forum is a pretty good self contained package which looks and functions very similar to vBulletin. It uses the WordPress user table so new users to your blog are also signed up to your forums and vice versa.

It has pretty nice moderator functionality and there’s plenty of themes and skins. It’s also real quick and easy to install. While WP-Forum doesn’t have any amazing new features to shout about, it’s a simple, well made package and covers all the standard needs.

http://www.fahlstad.se/wp-plugins/wp-forum/

2. Simple:Press Forum aka Simple Forum

This one has moved on in leaps and bounds recently and after a big makeover, and a new name, this script is now a serious contender. Simple:Press Forum is a stand alone plugin which integrates fully, using WordPresses registration and login system.

It has a large list of features, chief among which are a strong admin/moderator interface, the ability to play with letting guests and members posting in certain areas, private messaging, good theme/skin and customization support, signatures & avatars and pretty/SEO friendly permalinks.

Overall this plugin is now a very good choice and feels very similar to the major forum packages out there.

http://www.stuff.yellowswordfish.com/simplepress-forum/

1. bbPress

My personal favourite, bbPress is an excellent stand alone forum package for WordPress which is incredibly quick and easy to install and set up. Not only that but it has some of the best features and functions of the collection too and even manages to be pretty fast due to its fast and light code.

Features worth mentioning are the Akismet plugin as standard, which is also included in WordPress and pretty much eliminates spam, RSS feeds automatically available for every thread, a huge collection of plugins and a nice SEO friendly permalink option.

Some may be put off by the layout, which is less like traditional forums than the others, though themes can be created and uploaded easily. bbPress also doesn’t include avatars and some of the other industry standard features seen on other forums, though again, all of these issues can be treated quickly and easily with plugins. Their official site has plenty.

http://bbpress.org

While some of these packages offer almost the same in terms of functionality as the major stand-alone forum packages out there, many simply do not. If you want to combine WordPress with your existing forums then I recommend you check out How to Integrate WordPress with Forums: IPB, SMF, vBulletin & phpBB.

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