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

wordpress integration forum bbpress
lkessler picture lkessler · Oct 30, 2008 · Viewed 15.2k times · Source

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?

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

madlep picture madlep · Oct 30, 2008

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.

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