What is the best Forum software to Integrate with a Wordpress blog?

Question

If you wanted to add a user forum to your software site, and make it look and work like your WordPress blog, what forum software would you choose?

Apparently bbPress has the same origins as WordPress, but is it best or are there other choices that are better?

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Followup:

My final solution was to integrate bbPress 0.99 with WordPress 2.6. I have single login, integrated search, and identical styling for both blog comments and forum posts with combined user stats.

This used the basic integration with WordPress that bbPress 0.99 allowed, and inclusion of several bbPress plugins (many by _ ck _) that were heavily customized (read mangled) to my liking. The trickiest part was to get the cookies to work between the two.

The only downfall is I can no longer upgrade either WordPress or bbPress without a lot of work. But until those stop working, I'm fine.

If you're interested, see: www.beholdgenealogy.com/blog and www.beholdgenealogy.com/forum

Answer 1

See Integrating a Forum with WordPress at blogHelper.

Answer 2

bbPress seems to be about the best. You can kind of get it to integrate with the comments on wordpress, but not in a clean way. bbPress is pretty limited though.

There isn't really anything out there that does it simply. Especially with the look and feel - the way the themes work in WordPress allows totally custom PHP/HTML/CSS, so it's hard for any forum to match that automatically.

I hooked up punbb on my blog. It works, but it's pretty bare-bones. I mainly chose that because I'm on a shared host, and it's got a lighter footprint than other PHP forums.

Answer 3

I guess I have to add my own answer.

The "Integrating a Forum with WordPress article" is very good. But it is a bit old and the newer versions of WordPress do not work the same way, especially with cookies.

The best bet might be to wait until bbPress version 1.0 is out. They are working to use more of the same code as in WordPress and will try to fix some of the integration problems that happened when WordPress 2.6 came out. As ck says in that post: "the definition of integration is that the two softwares operate as one". If that is the goal, then it seems best to wait.

They are getting there. bbPress 1.0-alpha-2 was released a month ago and the integration features are starting to be included,

Answer 4

I think they are up to alpha 6 now. It seems pretty stable and you can integrate users etc with 2.7 wordpress.

Two issues I found was.

1, A number of plugin on BBPress break. I can't remember which ones, but some do. The sitemap one does I think.

2, There is an example of integrating themes, so that the wordpress header and footer wrap around the forum. I couldn't get this to work. It broke the style for the wp-admin and I could no longer login. Didn't have time to hack a solution.

Anyway, I set up a BBPress forum here http://www.stephenbaugh.com/blog/forums/

Should hopefully get the rest of the integration fixed soon as I want an integrated theme.

Cheers Stephen

Answer 5

http://simplepressforum.com/ has more features than bbPress and runs as a plugin. It uses the site memberlist and you can spec sub groups from there. Lots of options, all in the options menu. The developers seems pretty responsive and active too. They have a support forum. It's themeable, of course - has its own CSS file.

Definitely worth checking out.

Answer 6

bbPress 1.0 "final" is out now. http://bbpress.org/blog/2009/07/bbpress-1-0-final-finally-released/ Native integration, not very tested yet though.

Answer 7

Yes, bbPress is really the best forum to integrate with Wordpress, definitely.

Answer 8

I just installed WP-Forum 2.4. Really basic and bare bones, but it was easy to install, setup, and use. It is definitely limited in terms of options and customization, but what can you expect from a free forum that can be integrated into your site. That was the greatest part really - the fact that it integrated so easily and looks like I took the time to make it part of my site.

I'm still on the lookout for another, probably gonna try simple press next.

Answer 9

I know Bppress is the best forum software to integrate with Wordpress Blogs.But the software still having problem with maintaining sessions with member accounts.

I am running two or more community sites powered with Wordpress and i am using "SimplePress- Free plugin " and it working excellent for me.

If you want to see how the forum software working with my IT Professionals Community page? Take a look at here http://avanthu.com/forum Its working perfect with existing members and also for new members, before using the software i have tried many of the wordpress supported plugins but nothing works better than this. I strongly recommend the simple press forum plugin.

Answer 10

I recently wrote an article on integrating forums with Wordpress, and review some of the choices, related to my own experiences. It considers bbpress, phpbb, simplepress and others.

Answer 11

Have a look at this blog post on using custom post types in WordPress to build a forum natively. http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/07/16/a-wordpress-forum-plugin-using-custom-post-types