bbPress Review
Why add forums to your site?
Are you thinking about adding more community interaction to qatar email database free your WordPress blog? A forum where visitors can register and interact with each other is a great addition to any site.
Forums can help you:
Engage with your audience : Unless there is something that keeps them coming back to your website, most visitors won't return after one visit. If there is an active community that they can sign up for and participate in, it will give them a reason to come back.
Increase loyalty : When users return to your site again and again to participate in your forums, they are more likely to remember and choose your brand.
Conduct research : A forum on your website is a great way to gain data on the thoughts and feelings of your target audience. You can easily see on your own website what their main concerns, needs, and motivations are.
Crowdsourced Content : With your users' permission, you can share quality content from your forums on your website, blog, and social media.
And if your site is powered by WordPress, adding a forum is as easy as installing a plugin.
The only question is: which forum plugin is best for your site?
Why use bbPress?
Free and open source, bbPress is one of the most popular and highly rated WordPress forum plugins , with over 300,000 active installations.
One of the main developers of the plugin is Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress.
bbPress is designed to be lightweight and flexible. It isn't bloated with unnecessary features and won't slow down your site or introduce vulnerabilities.
How to create bbPress forums
Install and activate the plugin, and you will be redirected to a welcome page.
You can scroll to the bottom and click the Go to Forum Settings link , or click Settings » Forums in the WordPress dashboard menu.
At the top of the settings page, you can customize user settings to prevent spam.
bbPress Review - settings
Below are the forum features settings . Here you can enable favorites, subscriptions, topic tags, and other useful features.
bbPress Review - Features
Under Topics and replies per page , you can adjust how many topics are visible at once.
bbPress Review - topics and replies per page
And at the bottom of the page, under Single Forum Slugs and Forum User Slugs , you can adjust your URLs.
bbPress Review - slugs
Remember to click the Save Changes button at the bottom when you're done choosing your options.
To create your forums, navigate to Forums » New Forum .
Enter a title and description for your forum, and configure the options on the right side of the screen. Then click Post .
bbPress Review - publish forum
If your blog has permalinks enabled (you can check this under Settings » Permalinks ), you'll be able to see your forums at example.com/forums , where you can add your first topic.
bbPress Review - add thread
In your dashboard, you will now have a widget that shows the current status of your forums:
bbPress Review – dashboard widget
For more details on how to set up your forums, check out WPBeginner’s tutorial, How to Add a Forum in WordPress with bbPress .
How to style your forums
The appearance of your forums on your website is controlled by your theme's styles. There are no separate bbPress themes to customize the appearance of your forums.
If you want to customize the appearance of your forums, you will need to edit your theme 's CSS or add custom CSS .
What if bbPress doesn't fit with your current theme and you don't want to mess with CSS code?
You may want to consider switching to another WordPress theme that has built-in support and styling for bbPress.
You can also check out a plugin like CSS Hero, which lets you edit CSS with a visual editor, even if you don't know how to code. Check out our CSS Hero review to learn more about how it works.