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bbPress : A forum for your wordpress blog
August 28th, 2008I recently integrated a forum into one of my Wordpress blog and it really is a great thing to add if you have a “hot topic” people are talking about a lot. I will talk about a forum platform that integrates very well with wordpress for a good reason: it was developed by Wordpress developers!
Tell me!
I’m actually surprised no one really talked about it because it deserve the spotlight. The web application I’m talking about is called bbPress. bbPress can be installed without a Wordpress blog, but for that we already have some good forum platforms like vBulleting and phpBB. The real cool thing about bbPress is that it integrates with your Wordpress blog’s database. You can share the same users and login so you don’t really have to manage two different things, it’s really an extension of your blog. It supports what made Wordpress a success: Templates, easy administration interface and plugins.
Full of features?
bbPress doesn’t have the look of traditional forums running phpBB or vBulletin, it looks a little bit lighter but it doesn’t mean less features. Users can have their own avatar or Gravatar, you can have users with different levels of security, they can also add signatures, smiles and all that good stuff you would expect from a forum. If it doesn’t have the feature you want, there’s probably a plugin doing it. It’s really like wordpress. When you look at wordpress without any plugins it’s a good platform, but nothing that impressive. It’s really when you start customizing your template and adding plugins that you understand its power. If you want to have a look at what a forum might look like, you can have a look here:
http://bbpress.org/about/examples/
In the examples you will find the wordpress.org support forums and also the technorati.com support forums. These are two pretty big and important forums so even if bbPress looks light at first sight, it’s packed with features and can scale to a very large forum very easily.
Here’s the official features list from bbPress.org:
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Fast and light
We keep our code lean so that you get the best experience possible.
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Simple interface
One of our biggest goals is to keep things simple and make things intuitive. Our dream is that you forget you’re even using the software.
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Customizable templates
Not everybody likes the same pair of pants, so we allow you to dress up your forums however you like.
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Highly extensible
bbPress can’t toast your bagels, but a plugin for it sure could!
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Spam protection
A bundled Akismet plugin offers you an amazing weapon against spam.
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RSS Feeds
You want feeds? We get ‘em; they’re everywhere.
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Easy integration with your blog
WordPress and bbPress are siblings, and they get along together a lot better than you and your brother did when you were kids!
So there you go, you can now integrate a nice forum into your wordpress blog without too much pain! 
11 Responses to “bbPress : A forum for your wordpress blog”
What do you think?
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Your blog is awesome! Thanks for writing quality content. I frequent a blog that just created a forum and I was wondering how they did it and now I know.
Caroles last blog post..Chicken Breed Series #5–Orpingtons
Might be mine…who knows!
I think its pretty cool that it is integral to wordpress though I find forums soooo hard to get up and running. Mine pretty much stays dead most of the time.
Problem with forums that they require LOTS of active people to keep alive and ticking.
I’ve seen way too much forums with four-five topics per year activity…
May fit some blogs but clearly not most of them.
Rarsts last blog post..JkDefrag – single click defragmentation
cool recommendation. Must try it on my WP blog as i have to look for one.
Thanks for the share!
I have a forum installed on my blog. I have a few posts but I know I need more traffic on my blog to make it work better.
I really like the feature of the forum on my blog. I think maybe I’ll add a few topics to see if that help stimulate traffic on it
Brunos last blog post..Don’t be a Victim of Social Networking Online
once your blog has a large active userbase , forums is a good extension to have on the website
WebTrafficROIs last blog post..An Evening with The Blogging King – Yaro
sounds cool….will definitely give it a try….
SEO forumss last blog post..List of do-follow blogs to boost your Google Pagerank.
Surely! Optimizing a wordpress blog could be little tricky if you intend to manage all the details on your own. I have also written a guide on how to effectively SEO your Wordpress blog with plugins and how to use them.
Its here:
http://www.programmerfish.com/search_engine_optimization_for_wordpress_blog/
Wow it sounds cool! Do you have more information about it ? I would also like to include it. Thanks for the useful information and link.
Well, I don’t have much more information but I can say it works pretty well! I run in on another blog and while it’s not the most popular forum on Earth it does the job pretty well!