A few days back, before I made the decision that it would be better to halt the Computer Realm Community for now and start it once and for all which in my opinion is the best forum software ( or to be more precise best forum software and plugin, which would be vBulletin & vBSEO), i gave bbPress a shot. It took me a day of optimization and tweaking before i figured i’d rather stick to the former.
For those of you aren’t very familiar (and i wouldn’t be surprised if you are not), bbPress is an open source forum software, from Automattic, the same great team that brought you the well known Wordpress. While Wordpress is one of the best blogging platforms and used on a wide scale on popular as well as smaller blogs alike, bbPress is a recent project and still in its early stages.
Their tagline boasts ‘Simple, fast, elegant’ and i think that’s a very appropriate description for the bbPress forum software. If you are expecting to find a fully featured forum similar to every other free or paid forum software, you’ll probably be disappointed. bbPress lacks most of the features that a basic forum software possesses like categories, signatures and private messaging to name a few.
However, i doubt the reason behind the lack of features is as it is still in its initial stages. As there slogan implies, Automattic is probably looking to maintain bbPress as a basic forum software that can be highly customizable (as the title says). While by default bbPress is stripped off every single feature except for the basics for a forum like users, forums and posts, bbPress maybe customized to contain all these features. Thanks to the community based development that Automattic has successfully used in other projects like wordpress, there are third party plugins available for every other feature that a forum generally contains. These plugins maybe found at the bbPress official plugins directory.
Also if there is a feature you like and cannot find a plugin for, you might as well give it a shot yourself. Another feature of bbPress is the simplicity of the code, which is the main contributing factor for it being highly customizable.
One of the main advantages of bbPress over other forum software is the SEO factor. The URL format in bbPress is an inbuilt setting and maybe configured to have the usual numeric URL’s or SEO friendly named URLs based on the post title. Having such URL structure with phpBB or other popular free forum software, would require a special re-writing mod which has been developed by a third party and would never be as stable as the official release. It also does not have other SEO issues like duplication with session URL’s making bbPress more SEO friendly than other forum software.
While progress has been apparently slow with bbPress in terms of development, it seems like Automattic is looking to direct its attention towards bbPress. The official release post of Wordpress 2.7 stated that they are looking to offer better integration of bbPress with future versions of Wordpress. The Automattic team is looking to push users to bbPress as well. Their home page now contains an unmissable banner for bbPress. In the beginning of this year, Automattic raised $29.5M for their projects which included bbPress.
Summing up, bbPress is recommended if you are looking to develop a forum on a small scale and you are atleast a little familiar with a web-specific programming language to make slight modifcations yourself if you need to, and you won’t be alone, the Wordpress, bbPress and Technorati forums are powered by bbPress and they function pretty well. Also, as always in the Internet, there is an active bbPress community forum by one of the bbPress plugin developers which is a community you have to be a part of if you are looking to build a forum using bbPress.
People who read this post also read:
Please Share The Post If You Liked It:
You might also want to:
Discuss this in the
Computer Realm Forums
new!
Subscribe for future
updates for free by RSS
or
Email
Leave a comment below and get
CommentLuv
Found a typo, dead link or dead image above? Please leave a comment or
contact me.
Latest Forum Posts
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Get Free Updates Via Email
Thanks for the great article, it answered some questions I had. thanks again.
answers to questions’s last blog post..Can telephone and network signals be put on a single cat 5 wire?
Reply
No problem, thanks for the comment!
Reply
I wonder if bbPress compatible with any free hosting out there?
Reply
you could manually install it with most free hosts that support standard hosting requirements.
Reply
As you may know a domain name is just a name, not a real website. If you are going to create your forum website: 1- Buy a domain name. To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name.
Wildlife Photography’s last blog post..Magic of photography techniques
Reply
Buy a web hosting service to provide your online space and enable you to get your website online at your purchased domain name.
Reply
I have a community website through Heritage Web Solutions. I have blogs on my site “discussion board”. I absolutely love it. I tried doing a website on my own, I found that it took way too much of my time and money.
Reply
I want to purchase the software and run under my ownership and have Ad capability. Any recommendations?
Health and safety´s last blog ..Hidden advantage and importance of Health in our life
Reply