An open source, free forum plugin, bbPress is integrated on top of a WordPress site. This forum software may be installed as a plugin into a WordPress-powered website. Different from other conventional forum software, bbPress is not awkward and does not require it’s own database., which means it is much easier to place a forum into your website with this plugin. In addition, it still maintains the extensibility and simplicity of WordPress. It is capable of creating multisite forums. The plugin comes with customizable templates, and integrated to support spam prevention.
bbPress was established since miniBB has become excessively overstuffed with WordPress support forums. It was in year 2004 when the WordPress team decided to create a bbPress, which originally was not a plugin but a stand alone piece installation. The software was initially published on the official WordPress site. Since then, it has been converted into a new plugin.
Since bbPress is a plugin, it provides a convenient way to insert a forum into a WordPress site. This functions with the highest standard amenable WordPress themes. Well known open-source software platforms are often resource intensive, which makes them difficult to build into a website. However, this is not the case with bbPress. The software is lightweight and could blend easily into a WordPress theme.
bbPress was produced by the same people who produced WordPress. Hence, it is keeping the same principle for keeping things lightweight and small. It is also extremely extensible and able to handle custom forums expertly. Aside from this, there are some available active support forums that are backed up by contributors ready to help repair issues and fix bugs, like me.
Steps for bbPress Installation
The bbPress installation process is extremely simple just like installing any other WordPress plugin. You will have two choices for installing the bbPress plugin: Automatic bbPress Installation and Manual bbPress Installation with the use of FTP.
Automatic bbPress Installation
You may want to take a look at the easy steps in the automatic installation first as this is the recommended way to install bbPress.
- With this bbPress installation option, the first thing you need to do is to log into the WordPress administration panel, /wp-admin.
- After navigating the administration panel, you may then go to Plugins and click the “Add New” button inside the network administration dashboard, which can be located on WordPress Multisite. Or simply, Plugins > Add (in WordPress). You may easily find it at the right side of WordPress homepage.
- Inside the Search page, type bbPress in the search box and hit on “Search Plugins” button. After hitting the button, you will be displayed with various choices having bbPress on top of the returned list.
- Being displayed with the list of choices, you will see under bbPress two other links namely Details and Install Now. Of course, since you plan to install the plugin, click on the link named “Install Now”.
- After clicking the “Install Now” button, navigate to the plugins page within the site admin dashboard.
- Hovering over the dashboard, you will be displayed with several choices. Under bbPress, you will see the activate link, click on it and you are ready to go!
Manual bbPress Installation with FTP
For those who don’t want to go with the automatic option, there is also a manual process. As you may expect, this is a bit longer compared with the former one. The following steps:
- First, you will need to download the bbPress plugin from http://bbpress.org/download/.
- After downloading the file, unzip it to get all the files transferring to a folder on your computer.
- You may launch your preferred ftp software after the file extraction, I use FileZilla.
- Find the folder from your computer in the local view panel (to the left on FileZilla).
- Upload the plugin folder from your computer to /wp-content/plugins.
- Navigate to your WordPress site and login to the admin area, /wp-admin.
- Hover over to the plugins page found in the site admin dashboard.
- Just like in the automatic installation, you will be displayed with the list of plugins you may choose to activate.
- Under bbPress, click on the “Activate” link.
- After going about the process, you are now ready to use the bbPress plugin in your WordPress website.
Both of these bbPress installation options are efficient. But then, it will greatly depend on you which one you will choose, sometimes your site is not setup to automatically add plugins from the admin area. For convenience and easiness, most users prefer the simplicity of the automatic plugin installation. I would also recommend the automatic installation if your able to do so.
Forum Creation with bbPress
After you have installed bbPress, you can use it to add forum categories, forums, topics and replies from the WordPress admin area.
Click on Forum, and then New Forum button. It will direct you to the screen quite comparable to the post edit area of WordPress. Give a title to your forum and then provide a description for it. After which, you may then press the button named “Publish”.
Manage the Settings of bbPress Forum
Different from other well known forum software, bbPress comes with an extremely easy configuration page. To run bbPress forum settings, go to Settings and then Forums button. It is a bbPress settings page on which you could control a number of your forum aspects.
The primary option you will view on the page of Forums Settings includes “Disallow Editing After”. This setting has the default option of five minutes. The setting enables Forum participants from editing their posts once they have these published. After the set time, it is no longer possible for the author to edit posts. But then, a forum Moderator or Keymaster may override this setting.
The next option is “Throttle Posting Every” (specified seconds). It is a forum flood security measure. It enables you from controlling the length of time new posts should display on the forum. On the page of settings, you may configure topic and forum slug together with the number of posts and topics to display per page. You may also permit your viewers from subscribing to topics or adding these topics as their favorites.
With these easy steps and guidelines in getting bbPress installed, you should find it quick and simple to get started with bbPress. If you have any questions then leave me a comment below.
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