4 Great Choices For Wordpress Forum Plugin

It is easy to add a forum to your WordPress blog using WordPress forum plugins. Well, WordPress (WP) has evolved quite a bit since 2003 and now stands to be more than just a blogging system, its a full Content Management Service (CMS).

One technology important to any thriving community is communication between its members. A forum is a great way to facilitate the many-to-many conversations within a community that a blog cannot address.

1. Zingiri Forum



Zingiri is a unique plugin that integrates existing forum software, myBB, into WordPress. Zingiri provides the glue to connect MyBB, an easy to use, powerful, multilingual, feature-packed, and free forum software with WordPress. MyBB also includes a reputation system, multi-quote, and the ability to create custom BBCode (called MyCodes).

2. bbPress


Pound for pound bbPress is your best option for integrating a full fledged forum into your blog. bbPress has a very simple interface which makes it very popular amongst its users. The templates are easy to customize. In fact they are just as easy to customize as WordPress templates. And the plugin actually integrates the forum database with your WordPress database, that way the integration is seamless.

3. Simple Press

This is the best WordPress forum plugin solution out there. Its been around for several years, has a loyal following, and its well supported by its community. It offers tons of cool features and you can totally customize it to fit your needs. Simple:Press fully integrates with standard WordPress user profiles and logins as well as BuddyPress profiles. Other notable features include private messaging, post ratings, user rankings and badges, topic subscriptions, private and public forums, support for popular WordPress plugins, image and file upload tool, several skins and icon sets, and much more.

4. WP-Forum Plugin

This is the one I have personally used before on this blog and it worked great! I have removed it due to lack of participation at the time but installation and configuration was extremely simple and it also provides your blog with a community bulletin board that looks much like phpBB while completely integrated into your blog.



As far as I know latest version works with no issues with current WordPress core and should be painless ot install.

Features
Optional registration for posting and searching.

Mark threads as solved

Administrated through WP-admin.

Uses WordPress database for registration and users.

Spam words filter option. (Optional). The spam filter option gets the spam words from WordPresss own spam filter and words can be added in the WordPress admin -> option -> discussion.

PHP 4 compatibility.

Moderator can be set individually for every forum.

Supports BBCode. (Optional)

If you are looking for a more traditional forums look and feel WP-Forums is a great choice. One thing to consider when using it create a Page Template that has no sidebar. In most cases it will be quite simple if you know how to do small changes to your existing template and css file but if not it will work great with your existing theme.