With manyfold increase in no. of websites and internet users, community based online discussion board has rapidly evolved. We call it technically FORUM.. And to make the task of having a wonderful discussion/support board, there are various forum softwares available with some being open source under gpl license while some being paid ones with personal license.
Get your free forum
The best blogging CMS (content management system) is our WordPress – Simple & flexible. Continuing the tradition of simplicity & flexibility, another wonderful product from wordpress creators is BBPRESS – the topic of this post. BbPress is a forum/bulletin board software that is not slow, that is not bloated, that is not complex, that is not hard, that is not prone to getting hacked. bbPress is fast, elegant, simple, flexible, highly customizable forum software that can get your forum running live within minutes.
Why should you go for bbPress ?
- bbPress is free forum software open to you to customize it to suit your needs….
- Ease of integration – If you have a blog with many users and you may want to have a forum, bbPress is right for you.. With wordpress- bbpress inbuilt integration support, your wordpress blog users can also be considered as forum users and vice-versa.. A user logged onto forum is also logged on to blog. Integrating blog and forum gives a lot of benefits especially if you offer products or services on your blog and want to use bbPress as support forum..
- Speed - bbpress is remarkably fast as it is not bloated and has clean and simple outlook.
- Extension – There are lots of plugins and extension available for bbPress which extend your bbPress capabilities. For developers, creating new plugin for bbPress is not a hard task as it follows approximately the same mechanism as you use to create a plugin for wordpress.
- SEO – Pretty permalinks & tags inbuilt support.
- Simple & customizable.. – Themes for bbPress can be easily made or customized in accordance with your blog or website outlook.
If you think wordpress has been a good blogging software.. Bbpress is no different.
Some of the negative points which may distract you from bbPress >
- Simplicity – Some people like features and loads of features, They want chatbox, group management, profile extension, attachment facility, etc etc.. Well bbPress is made to be simple so all these features & several others are not available with default installation.. Of course, you can cutomize and add plugins and other codes to get new features into your forum.
- Plugins – Most of the good n great plugins are created by _ck_ . So Till _ck_ supports those plugins, you are going good but what if he doesn’t support a particular cause. As _ck_ is not supporting the latest version of bbPress i.e. 1.0.2 and therefore the people who installed latest version have missed some of great plugins by _ck_ such as bbPress attachments, bbPress reputation, etc.
- The bbPress community is not well-exposed. A few people and developers have played major part in its development.
- Wordpress Integration – Well bbPress is designed and facilitated to go together with wordpress blog but integrating bbPress and wordpress has been a headache but things have changed and with latest version of bbPress and wordpress, integration is now a few steps ahead. But still, with integration, I mean user integration not the design/theme integration. For theme and visual design integration, you need to go yourself.
A few notes or Tips :
- You can use your blog database info for installing bbpress forum software so that you may integrate blog and forum later. You don’t need separate database..
- Don’t install the bbpress on ‘forum‘ directory of your site. Install it in ‘forums‘ or other custom directory of your site. (Actually when you create categories, each category is given the word forum by default in its slug. For ex- Suppose you installed bbPress on http://ursite.com/forum and now if you create a category named general. The url of that category will be http://ursite.com/forum/forum/general .. So, Its better to avoid repetition of words in slug by using forums as bbpress installation directory.)
- Go through plugins repository section of bbPress and add atleast a few plugins which u need. I bet you can’t go as simple as bbPress is :P
bbPress Forum Showcase : You know the big technorati discussion board is using bbPress forum software ? Below are some of the Big Brand websites using bbPress as their forum software.
Technorati: Support: Discussions
Wordpress Support forum
the famous How-To-Geek
FreeTechJournal Forum (coming soon) ;)
Additional links and Info :
If you have your own forum using bbPress, Don’t forget to show us. If you need any help with bbPress, Drop your comment here.. Also tell us whether you liked this post ?
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Thanks for informing about bb press forum. Never tried to launch it. Have good experience with Simple Machines Forum.
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