Simple:Press WordPress Forum Plugin

As far as I can tell, I’m not the only one who has pretty much given up on bbPress, WordPress’s long promised forum app. Simple:Press is a nice alternative that installs as a WordPress plugin and lets the user configure a forum within a WordPress site.

Be warned, though — Simple Press is fairly complex to set up and has hundreds of options. For the most part that’s simply inevitable with a full-featured forum, but be warned you’ll need to spend some time with the admin interface and customizing a page template to make it look nice.

On the other hand, it’s worth it as it already does out of the box pretty much everything that bbPress may do someday if it ever really gets the attention it needs. I’ve got a test setup here, though I’m still trying to decide if I really need a forum here.

13 thoughts on “Simple:Press WordPress Forum Plugin”

  1. Does SimplePress automatically sync up with blog posts and comments on blog posts? I’m still of the mind that until one of these does that it’s useless. I remember before you used Conversant you used to have to cut and paste each “article” you wrote for AR.net into your forum software, which was a HUGE pain in the behind.

  2. Simplepress so far seems to be a great solution – there’s even a tickbox on your posts page to add a new discussion to the forum.

    And the Admin is really well laid out.

  3. @Mark Morgan: Yes, it adds on option on each post to autocreate a forum thread. I haven’t delved in to the settings enough to see if it’s possible to automate that rather than having to check a box each time.

  4. Hi,

    I tried to add image but I don’t know how to do this
    Can anyone be kind to tell me how?

    thanks a lot

  5. Hey Brian,

    Thanks for the info… it looks like the link to your forum is still bbpress (at least that’s what the footer link says on the page).

    In any case, can you please spell out the benefit of having a forum link to a blog post? Isn’t the article comment section a similar enough tool that would allow readers to post and reply directly in the article comments section?

    I’m just not getting why a forum would be needed for that reason (to create an automatic thread about a post).

    Thanks.

  6. [b]Moral dilemna![/b]

    What’s up? Bored between classes here so decided to introduce myself.

    OK actually I had something on my mind. Here’s what happened School was out and I was heading home, I was hungry so I dropped into this place for a snack and picked this sandwitch from the menu and took it to a table and sat down when I was done I remembered I didn’t pay!

    Yeah evidently they were super busy and distracted because there was this manager/investor type looking around everywhere and talking to them. So I was just about to go up to the counter and say I hadn’t paid but then I realized if I did that the owner guy might get mad at the employees. So I just left. What should I have done do you think?

  7. I’ve been thinking a lot about forums, and I’m just about convinced that it’s best to just have a page of recent comments to the blog and be done with it. It should be possible to do the classic “bump to top” thing and have the design look like a forum. It’s what I did with Unreason and that seemed to work out okay.

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