10 Best Forum Plugins for WordPress
Hello,
Building online forums requires a lot of patience and sometimes more than average technical knowledge. For beginners, this usually means learning a new software system from the ground up. What if we told you that you can build a robust online forum within your familiar WordPress CMS?
There are lots of different forum platforms you could use, but we know you love WordPress and want all of the things to integrate with it. Luckily for you, there are also WordPress plugins which make it easy to create and manage discussion forums. Today in this post, we have hand-picked 10 Best Forum Plugins for WordPress.
Let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress plugins for Online community.
bbPress
One of the most popular and widely used forum plugins for WordPress platform, bbPress is good enough to take care of the forum need perfectly. The plugin is simple yet handles all the forum related requirements perfectly.
You will need a bbPress compatible theme to use this plugin, though it’s not a very difficult task to find one. All the BuddyPress compatible themes work perfectly with bbPress as well and you can bother the plugins with each other perfectly.
Key Features:
- Simple Setup
- Fully Integrated
- Single Installation
- Multisite Forums
- and more…
BuddyPress
This plugin is not a forum plugin per se – BuddyPress is the social network giant in the WordPress world, but it can be used as a community forum. It benefits from a worldwide community of thousands that use and work with BuddyPress, so we decided to include it.
BuddyPress is an extremely powerful and flexible community plugin for WordPress. It includes features such as user profiles, groups, activity streams and notifications. So its default functionality could, in fact, be used to provide a community forum for discussion. It does integrate with other plugins (like bbPress, below) if you want to create a full-featured forum community.
Key Features:
- Notifications
- Private Messaging
- Activity Streams
- Groups
- Profiles
- Settings
- and more…
DW Question Answers
DW Question Answers allows you to create a question answer site with WordPress.
Advantages of DW Question Answers:
- Allows question categories and tags. This gives your site an SEO boost with user driven content.
- Users can vote and comment on answers.
- CAPTCHA support helps you combat spam.
- Can be used as support forum.
- and more…
WP Symposium
WP Symposium is an alternative to BuddyPress. It includes social networking features integrated into groups and forums. This is the ultimate social network plugin for WordPress. You can create your own social network, on your WordPress website.
Advantages of WP Symposium:
- Premium support available by upgrading to premium membership.
- Includes features such as events, gallery, alerts,
- integration with Facebook, etc.
- Multiple style templates come builtin with the plugin
- and more…
CM Answers
Next on our list is another question and answer style plugin. CM Answers has over 2,000 active installs and a 3.8-star satisfaction rating.
We have covered the basic question and answer functionality before, but CM Answers adds some interesting features to aid in user engagement, like displaying the view count for each question, user notifications and social media registration using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
Key Features:
- Includes a views count
- Includes an answers count
- Administrators can moderate question & answers and can receive email notifications.
- Users can receive notifications when answering a question pending follow-up.
- Sorting options in the question and answer pages.
- and more…
AnsPress
The next plugin on our list also uses the question and answer format, similar to DW Question & Answer. With over 3,000 active installs and a 4.2-star satisfaction rating, AnsPress is clearly a good option for many WordPress websites.
Like DW Question & Answer, AnsPress provides a complete question and answer system for WordPress. Basic functionality such as adding, editing, sorting, answering and voting on questions is supplemented by nice features like labels (e.g. open, closed, duplicate), favoriting questions and a user points system.
Key Features:
- Notification
- Featured Question
- Sorting question and answer by many options.
- Ajax based form submission
- Theme system
- Flag and moderate posts
- Voting on question and answer
- Question tags and categories
- and more…
Simple:Press
Simple:Press is a simple lightweight WordPress forum plugin that integrated with WordPress site perfectly. It’s a fully responsive plugin that will make your forum look great all kinds of modern devices.
Also, the plugin comes with an extendable architecture so you can easily work with the plugin and make it perfect as per your requirement. The plugin is well documented to help the users make the best use of this plugin.
Key Features:
- Forum
- Integration
- Security
- SEO
- Profiles
- API
- Localisation
- and more…
MiwoVoice – Discuss your ideas
Always wanted to receive feedbacks from visitors ? Listen to the visitors voice and distribute your services by involving your visitors into it through MiwoVoice.
MiwoVoice is a WordPress User Feedback plugin that provides a platform to share, vote and discuss ideas through your users and/or visitors. Let the visitors discuss and decide which idea will be the best for you.
Key Features:
- Unlimited ideas
- AJAX Interface
- Catchy design (UserVoice style)
- Bad words filter
- SEF URLs and SEO (Metadata)
- Avatar support with Gravatar
- and more…
WP Pro Forum System
A premium forum plugin for WordPress, it comes with all the important features and options that you may need to create a successful forum on your site. This plugin is super clean, minimal and user-friendly.
This forum plugin is created to work perfectly in the front-end of the site. However, the admin has all the options to manage all forums, topics, replies, categories and tags perfectly.
Key Features:
- Edit Topics, Replies and Comments.
- Close Topics.
- Follow Topics.
- Sticky Topics.
- Like Topics & Replies.
- Share Topics & replies.
- Customize the style
- and more…
Question Answer
Create Awesome Question and Answer Website in a Minute. Built Question Answer site for your WordPress.
Key Features:
- schema.org support.
- Archive page via shortcode.
- frontend question submission form via shortcode.
- Awesome account page via shortcode.
The above-mentioned forum WordPress plugins are good enough to handle your product or service support page. If you are starting your forum now, I would recommend you to try bbPress as it is the most popular and widely used forum plugins. You will easily find support content in case you come across any difficulty with your forum section.
We will be adding a couple of more forum plugins to this list soon and guide you about the best forum themes as well. So, do bookmark this page.
Thank you reading this post!! Feel free to suggest your own Plugins for this collection.
