2014-01-17

 
We have selected 5 top forum plugins for bloggers to add a forum to their WordPress blogs to facilitate the many-to-many conversation within a community that their blogs can't address, all of which are easy-to-use and helpful to those people who have no coding skill to write quality content, improve page ranking and manage their blogs.

There are so many forum plugins available on the WordPress.org community and third party websites, which makes these bloggers with limited technical knowledge get confused with the wide options and unable to choose the best ones. To relieve their worry, we have reviewed thousands of plugins and found 5 forum plugins that are especially good. In below, we have listed the detailed subscriptions of the selected ones to help you to know more about them and choose the most proper one.

No.1: bbPress

Requirement: WordPress 3.6 or higher

Downloads: 1.052.637

Price: Free

If you have been frustrated with forums or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked, you should try bbPress that focuses on ease of integration, ease of use, web standards and speed. They are keeping things as small and light as possible, while still allowing for great add-on features through the extensive plugin system of WordPress. Pros of this plugins are listed below.

Integrates very well into WP admin panel.

From the makers of WordPress itself.

Work great with BuddyPress.

Integrates with your existing design and page templates.

Download bbPress Plugin



No.2: Simple:Press

Requirement: WordPress 3.3 or higher

Downloads: 203,408

Price: Free

Simple:Press, the number one forum plugin that integrates seamlessly into your WordPress blog. Whether you need a small private forum or a large public arena, Simple:Press are able to scale to the needs of your community and offers the features normally only available from a stand-alone forum application. This plugin is driven by themes and templates, which makes customizing your forum to your own design and requirements a reality.

Simple:Press is featured with the following highlights:

Forum status including online list.

Forum ranks and badges.

Image thumbnails and enlargements.

Custom smileys including uploads.

Download Simple:Press Plugin



No.3: Talki Embeddable Forums

Requirement: WordPress 2.0.2 or higher

Downloads: 66,018

Price: Free

Talki Embeddable Forums are the easiest way to host a forum, message board, or discussion board on your blog. This plugin can add a forum page to your blog and allow members to start their own conversations and topics on your site. The forums work with WordPress along with global login systems, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and a dozen of others. With this plugin, members can be automatically notified of their responses. In addition, you are able to promote members to moderators and admin status.

Features integrated with Talki Embeddable Forums:

Easy-to-use admin panel.

Ability to make announcements at the top of the forum.

Supports embedding of media, such as video, image and flash.

Supports for sharing topics easily between members.

Download Talki Embeddable Plugin

No.4: Vanilla Forums

Requirement: WordPress 3 or higher

Downloads: 59,185

Price: Free

Vanilla benefits from the power of open-source, with is a truly open source, standards-compliant, and fully customized plugin with more than 10,000 developers contributing to the project and over 500 add-ons that can make your community do anything you need it to do. Therefore, at Vanilla, you are able to create a customized, unique and intuitive community that rewards positive participation, automatically curates content and lets members drive moderation.

In addition, migrating to Vanilla from any other platform is a breeze, with ready-made exporters for vBulletin, phpBB, bbPress, etc. More features included in this plugin are listed as below.

Easy to install.

Add forum widgets to your blog.

Embed your forum right in your blog.

Manage your forum in WordPress.

Download Vanilla Forums Plugin

No.5: Bublaa Embeddable Forums

Requirement: WordPress 2.0.2 or higher

Downloads: 15,535

Price: Free

Coming with 3 tools that work seamlessly together in real-time, Bublaa adds unique real-time discussions to your blog, which combines forums and comments so that you are able to build a discussion community like never before on one platform. This plugin includes rich features, such as unique forum interface, rich text, pictures, video and link preview, email notification, social login and sharing, etc.

With Bublaa, you don't need to worry about WordPress updates because your forum and comments are hosted with them. Moreover, all public forums and comments are organized into a Bublaa network that allows you to attract more people to your discussions and blog.

Download Bublaa Plugin

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