WordPress is indeed a perfect world to explore when it comes to content creation. Well among all the capabilities allowed by WordPress, plug-ins had been making things much easier. From the numerous options available, you may be striving to pick the most reliable WorsPress forum plugin. However, this discussion would surely let you have better views about the same.
Forums would be really important for you to be able to create a virtual online community, connect with and engage users, share ideas, discuss and support one another. Being a website owner, this is going to help you improve engagement, involving your entire users’ community into the discussions and implementing suitable changes then.
Best WordPress Forum Plug-ins
You could easily come up with a long list of WordPress plugins. However, picking up the best ones for web developement from them always does it well. You may use the most preferable ones from those mentioned below:
- bbPress
When discussion forums are being talked about, bbPress makes its place as one of the highly recommended wordpress plugins. This is one of the oldest and highly developed plugins. It does not involve coding extensions and is highly customizable. It is open source and known well for its speed. Also, ease of use and integration are some of its most considerable features. Although old, it can be integrates with several other plugins to attain the experience of a fully-featured set up.
- WPMUDEV’s Forum
With an absolutely boring name, this plugin allows you to add as much forums for as many sites you want. It is also a great one to be used with a WordPress Multisite. In case, you’re an agency having multiple sites, each of them handled by different people, you may use this plugin to make the controllers, the admin of the plugins they use. It is the best when you’ve been searching for the one that could be handled from a central location and suits perfect for agency level operations. Since individual admins can control their own forums, it makes things a lot easier than any other options available.
- wpForo Forums
One of the most suitable picks for both large and small communities, this is a modern, feature-rich forum plugin. This plugin offers users with three major layouts namely: question & answer, extended and simplified layout. With five interesting premium add-ons, this is one of the best WordPress community plugin. These plugin add-ons include ad Manager, Embeds, Advanced Attachments, Blog Cross Posting and Private Messages. However, it may be quite an issue for beginners to handle it well.
- Simple:Press
This is another general forum plugin suitable for WordPress installation. It has been designed for both large general communities and smaller private communities. Like bbPress, it is also fast loading and light weight. It is allured by several different typical forum features that users may often want as default. These features include forum ranks and badges, handling unread posts at user level, spoil tags, avatar uploads custom emojis and more.
- WP Pro Forum System
This premium plugin is regarded to provide everything at the upfront. It is the one that has no provisions for membership and no separately priced plugins. The plugin lets you utilize all basic forum options including code support, image support, allowance to post content visible only to the admin, frontend and backend management, customizable permalinks, customizable styles, and sharing links.
- DW Question & Answer
It had been one of the most preferable Question & Answer plugin that has brought up several considerable question and answer platforms like Quora and StackOverflow. It is one of the best options for adding functionality to a WordPress website. It allows submitting, filtering, ordering, editing and deleting questions. The answers to these questions can be set as private or public. Though there had been several compatibility issues with it, probable results were also look up at.
- Discussion Board
This could be one of the preferable alternatives for other plugins mentioned here. It could be helpful to add on a discussion board, question answer or message board. This plugin allows you to add forums for frontend registration and login form. The website users can answer and view and put on questions. Unlike the other plugins here, Discussion Board allows settings for user roles for forums. You would be able to decide who has access to the discussion board and who can post and view comments.
- Boards
This is a plugin with easily manageable configurations and user-friendly interface. As soon as you install it, it loads three main pages the login and registration form page and another form page that allows adding new posts and comments. The automatic set up makes things handled easily and turns it to be user friendly. The plugin is available in free and premium versions; you can try it for free first and then add up functionalities, purchasing premium packages.
- CM Answers
This is yet again a question answer type plugin with appreciable functionalities. In order to aid user engagement, CM Answers brings up many interesting features. This includes user notifications, displaying view counts, and social media registration using Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. There had been several support issues that could be managed with additional plugins.
- BuddyPress
This isn’t a forum plugin but being a giant in the WordPress, it can be used as a community forum. It benefits from a worldwide community that operates along with WordPress. This is an extremely powerful and flexible community plugin for web design. It includes features like user profiles, activity streams, groups and notifications. Its default features could be therefore used to set up community forums. It can be integrated with other plugins to make it even more functional.
- Muut
This is a newer name among discussion forums, yet managed to make a great place for itself in the industry with several positive reviews. This plugin brings on the ability of inducing immediacy of response and also brought up a fresh look to the appearance of conversations within the WordPress community. It avails real-time forums that are rich in features allowing email notifications, spam filtering and threaded commenting.
- AnsPress
Much similar to DW Question and Answer, it is a good option for WordPress websites. Just like the former, it brings up a perfect question answer system for WordPress websites. It sets out all probable features allowing to post, sort, edit questions and list the ones with appropriate responses, availing a better environment to operate.
Your toolbox could be well established with some of the best plugins from the above-mentioned list. All of them come up with various interesting and equally helpful features that could make things way easier.
