Looking to add a forum or bulletin board to your WordPress website? Or maybe you want to find a new forum platform because you are not happy with your current forum software. Well you need not look any further, as

  • Click the Add New button, which takes you to the search plugins page, then type “bbPress” into the search bar, and click Search Plugins to find the plugin.
  • The “bbPress” plugin should be at the top of the list; click on the link Install Now to add the bbPress 2.3.2 version to your WordPress installation.
  • Click OK to install the plugin.
  • Once the installation is complete you will see the “Successfully installed the plugin…” message. Your bbPress plugin is installed but not activated just yet. Click to Activate Plugin.
  • Once the bbPress plugin is activated, you will be taken to the “Welcome” page.

    • BbPress is now installed within your WordPress blog engine.

    Also, notice that the “Forums, Topics, and Replies” tab section has been added to the left sidebar. This is where we will start our first forum, which I will cover in the next post.

    bbPress features

    Many of the features can be configured from the bbPress settings page which is shown below:

    Here is a list of highlighted features that bbPress brings to the table.

    • Search the forum only within forum content and keep search separated from blog posts or pages content
    • Configure the forum search to live anywhere relative to the forum index choosing your own slug
    • Import bbCodes and happy faces into your forum code
    • Import forum content from Vanilla and Mingle forums to easily make the switch to bbPress
    • You can use bbPress to manage your BuddyPress Group Forums with unified integration and improved performance
    • Comes with a simplified editor that allows HTML tabs
    • Template stacking allows you to replace specific template parts on the fly without having to modify an existing theme
    • Has been tested in the default Twenty Thirteen theme that now delivers with the latest WordPress installs and upgrades
    • Statistics page now comes with easy to use shortcodes
    • Main forum settings allow you to:
      • Set editing timeout in minutes
      • Set throttle post in seconds
      • Allow topic and reply revision logging
      • Allow users to mark favorite topics
      • Allow users to subscribe to a topic
      • Allow topics to have tags
    • Page settings allow you to:
      • Set the number of topics and replies per page
      • Set the number topics and replies that display on each RSS page
    • Archive slug settings allow you to:
      • Customize the root slugs to prefix your forums base and topics base
      • Customize slugs for single forums, topics, replies, tags, users, and views
    • Allows you to use and set Akismet to prevent forum spam

    Several of the features listed above will be described and reviewed in more detail along with how to get your WordPress forum engine started on the right track in my next post on the bbPress plugin.