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How to Add a Forum to Your WordPress Website

Randy Brown

Adding a forum is a great way to build a community around your WordPress website. Forums are a great way to build and maintain traffic. They build a social network on your platform where users can interact, create content, help each other, share information, build long-tale traffic, and share content on their favorite social networks. The best thing – it brings readers back to your site… over and over… as often as possible. And who doesn’t want that?

The goal is to build a community around your WordPress website. This way readers won’t leave your site to go to an offsite forum. You want one site – not two. One site is easier to maintain and promote. The solution is to build a forum into your WordPress site. There are two ways you can do this:

  1. Create the forum within WordPress
  2. Integrate and existing forum into WordPress

There are plenty of forum engines available across the web that let you create and run your very own forum. In this article I will discuss both types and look at some plugins that will let you easily add a forum to your WordPress website.

Create a Forum within WordPress using Plugins

If you want to create a brand new forum then you might as well create it within your WordPress website. This is the method that I recommend the most because you only have to handle one website. Everything is fully integrated and the forum platform is designed specifically for WordPress so it will operate better and smoother than integrating two systems that were not designed to work together.

There are several good platforms available. Some are free, some are paid. These are my favorite (and some of the most popular) plugins to create your very own forum within WordPress.

bbPress

BbPress is a free plugin from the creators of WordPress and is one of the most popular forum plugins with over 200,000 active installs. They’ve kept it as lean as possible so it runs fast and smooth. You can create multiple forums and handle topics and replies from the dashboard. It adds a new post type called forum. Creating a forum is just like creating a post. The forum looks like any other forum, it’s just placed within a WordPress post. Since it’s from Automattic it has clean code and integrates perfectly into any WordPress installation.

One thing that sets bbPress apart is the number of extensions available. If bbPress doesn’t do something you want it to right out of the box there is a good chance you can find an extension to add the function. Both free and premium extensions are available from many third party providers.

BuddyPress

At its core BuddyPress is a social network. So why then did I include it in a list of forum plugins? A social network is essentially a forum with added features. It allows users to connect with others, create groups, and have private conversations. You can view notifications, track activity, adjust account settings, extend profile features, and more. BuddyPress can be expanded with 100’s of free extensions. Like bbPress, BuddyPress is from Automattic, the makers of WordPress and integrates into WordPress seamlessly.

Simple:Press

Simple:Press can build any size forum you need, whether it’s for a small group or a large community, with all of the features you expect in a standard forum. It includes all of the admin functions plus custom smileys, sub forums, statistics, optional shortcodes, email notifications, and more. It also includes SEO and localization. It’s designed to work on all types of devices and screen sizes. It will integrate with many services and plugins including:

Prices range from free to $135 per year. The premium subscriptions start at $10 per month. They include various levels of support, codex access, discounts on themes and plugins, and different numbers of free themes and plugins.

WP Forum Server

This free plugin includes all the standard forum features including the ability to choose moderators, create categories and forums, create user groups, and more. You can choose from one of four built-in skins if you want to change the look. You can place the forum on any page or post using a shortcode. This one is simple to use and doesn’t have a lot to set up.

WP Symposium Pro Social Network plugin

This is another social network plugin that has a strong forum feature built-in. It gives you plenty of shortcodes that you can place on pages or within posts to display your forums, view activity, alerts, avatars, friends, profiles, etc. Shortcodes for the forums include comments, pages, posts, sharethis, show posts, etc. It includes video tutorials to get you started. It will send email alerts. You can create unlimited forums.

The core plugin is free. There are plenty of premium extensions available if you want to expand the functionality. Using extensions, forums can include attachments, YouTube videos, and subscriptions. You can choose between several layouts and you can tailor the forum to your tastes.

WP Pro Forum

This premium plugin creates a standard forum on the frontend of your website with an admin area on the backend so you can manage replies, topics, forums, categories, and tags. Users can add images and video to their posts. It also has a voting system. You can style the forum to match your theme.

The Regular license is $20 and is for use by you or one client, in a single end product that end users are not charged for. The Extended license is $100 and is for use by you or one client, in a single end product that end users can be charged for.

Groups Forums

This premium plugin is based on a free plugin called Groups. It adds functionality for unlimited forums. You can allow every user or only members of a group to post and reply to topics in a forum and still keep forums visible to the public. It has pending and published topic notifications. It includes shortcodes to let users submit and edit topics on the Front End, show user’s topics, and list forums, and provide tag clouds and search forms. It has widgets for forums, topics, tags, and search. It has sticky topics. You can also use it as a support system and assign topics to specific users.

The Regular license is $26 and is for use by you or one client, in a single end product that end users are not charged for. The Extended license is $130 and is for use by you or one client, in a single end product that end users can be charged for.

Integrating an Existing Forum into WordPress

What if you have an existing forum? If you have very few users than you might consider creating a new forum in WordPress using one of the above plugins and just tell your users you’re moving it. If it’s popular then you might not want to create a brand new forum. That would do away with the hard work you’ve done to build your traffic and number of users. Users have already shared content and placed links that might not go anywhere if you do away with the forum.

In this case you might want to integrate your existing forum into WordPress. You can get a plugin that creates a bridge between the forum platform and WordPress. Here are a few plugins that support the most popular forum platforms.

WP-United : phpBB WordPress Integration

This free plugin works as a phpBB bridge to integrate your phpBB forum into your WordPress site. It integrates users, templates, and behaviors between the two platforms. It also has a cross-platform posting feature so something that’s posted in WordPress will automatically post in the forum. You can turn this on or off.

It includes 10 widgets:

These features can be turned on or off.

vBSSO

vBSSO is a free plugin that creates a bridge between WordPress and a vBulletin forum. It has two components. The first is a vBulletin plugin that creates an interface for authenticating users, controlling access, and managing user profiles. The second is a plugin for WordPress so it can communicate with vBulletin and exchange data. It uses vBulletin Groups, allows for a single sign-on with a custom log-in page, syncs avatars, and will run across multiple sub-domains. It’s easy to set up and has a quick-start guide to get you on the right track.

Vanilla Forums

Vanilla Forums is a cloud-based forum that is hosted on their servers that you can integrate into your WordPress site using a plugin. It includes a native mobile version so users can browse and post from any mobile device. Exporters allow you to migrate from other platforms such as phpBB, bbPress, vBulletin, and more. You can place the forum in pages or posts. There’s a widget that provides information such as recent activity, recent discussions, and discussion categories. You can moderate your forum from within WordPress.

Prices start at $199 per month.

vBulletin Connector

This premium plugin is another connector that bridges WordPress with vBulletin. It creates matching vBulletin threads in WordPress and allows users to post in vBulletin from WordPress. It will display vBulletin comments in a WordPress post and will create a trackback link from a vBulletin thread to your WordPress post. It supports custom avatars and smileys. It will also support multisites.

The Regular license is $24 and is for use by you or one client, in a single end product that end users are not charged for. The Extended license is $120 and is for use by you or one client, in a single end product that end users can be charged for.

Migrating Existing Your Forum to WordPress

Another option is to migrate your forum to WordPress. Most of these solutions are paid and some will not migrate completely so you might not be able to migrate attachments or other various components of your forum. Once you import your forum you can either point your domain to your WordPress site or place a link with the information that the forum has moved. Here is a short list of choices:

Plugin

Migrating Service

Final Thoughts

Creating or integrating a forum within your WordPress website is a great way to build a community around your website. It might take some time to get everything set up. It will definitely take a lot of time to moderate the forum. The added traffic and community that will be built around your website is well worth any efforts you put into it.

Of these, I’m the most impressed with bbPress. It will create a simple forum that can be expanded with add-ons so you can have just about any features you want. It will also import from many platforms. It’s made by Automattic and it’s free. This is the first one I would try.

How about you? Do you have a forum within your WordPress website? Did you use one of these solutions? Do you have another solution to discuss? Tell us about it in the comments.

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