Forums or bulletin boards are an excellent way to build an audience for your website. While there are lots of open source forum creation solutions available, we also have some popular plugins for WordPress.
In today’s post, I will introduce you to bbPress, the most popular WordPress plugin for creating forums.
Installing bbPress
To get started, download and install bbPress in your WordPress site. Once you activate the plugin, you will be taken to a welcome screen like the following –
You will also find three new menu items in your dashboard – ‘Forums’, ‘Topics’ and ‘Replies’.
Creating New Forum
In order to create a new forum, go to Forums > New Forum. You will be taken to a page which looks almost like the default post editor. Provide the title, a short description and click ‘Publish’.
Despite being called forums, these are actually forum threads. Once you have added some new threads, you can take a look at your forum. To do that, go to the forums page. The URL should be like this –
www.yoursite.com/forums/
Don’t forget to replace ‘yoursite.com’ with the domain name of your website.
Creating Topics
There are two ways to add new topics in your bbPress-powered forum – from the back-end and from the front-end.
To create a new topic from the front-end, go to the forum page and open the relevant thread. You will be taken to a page like the following –
You will find several fields to provide the topic title, description, tags, topic type, topic status, etc. The topic type includes three options – Regular, Sticky and Super Sticky.
While regular topics will be posted without any specialty, sticky and super sticky will stick a post on top of the other topics inside that thread. The topic status field lets you mark any topic as open, closed, spam, trash or pending.
If you want to add topics from the back-end, go to Topics > New Topic from your website dashboard. On that page, you will find the familiar WordPress post editor along with the title and description fields for the topic. On the right side, you will find options to set the topic type, status and the relevant thread. After making the necessary changes, click ‘Publish’.
Creating Replies
In order to participate in any discussion, you can reply to the relevant topic. To do that, open the topic first. You will find a ‘Reply To: …’ section after the topic content. Provide your comment in the text area, add any tag(s) if you want and then click ‘Submit’.
Setting up the Forum
Once you have a bunch of forum threads, topics and replies created in your site, you can manage them from the dashboard. To view complete lists of them, get back to your dashboard and go to Forums > All Forums, Topics > All Topics or Replies > All Replies. From these pages, you can perform various operations including edit, delete and view.
In order to configure various options of your forum, go to Settings > Forums. The page is divided into different sections.
The first one, ‘Forum User Settings’ allows you to disable editing after a specific number of minutes, allow guests to create topics and post replies, provide an auto forum role for all the registered users, etc.
In the ‘Forum Features’ section, you will find separate options to allow revisions, favorites, subscriptions, search, post formatting, topic tags, level of reply threading, etc.
‘Topics and Replies Per Page’ section lets you choose how many topics and replies should be displayed per page. The next section lets you define the number for the RSS pages.
In the Forum Slug sections, you can provide custom slugs for various forum pages like the main forum, topic, reply, search, favorites, etc.
After making all the changes, click ‘Save Changes’. Now you have your forum ready.
Final Words
So, that’s how you use bbPress to create a forum for your WordPress site. Let me know if you have any questions about the plugin.
And if you are already using a forum plugin, don’t forget to share your experience by leaving a comment below.