Best WordPress Forum Plugin

[gConverter]

Hello TAZ!
Finally we got professional, modern and complete (not lightweight) forum plugin for WordPress called wpForo. wpForo is the only one which comes with multi-layout forums. You can create hybrid community. And I decided to start a thread regarding WP forum plugins and especially about this new plugin, we have some chose now Not only bbPress. Currently I see many plugins like:

1. wpForo
2. Simpleress
3. AnsPress
4. CM Answers
   
5. DW Question & Answer

What do you think about these plugins? What is the main benefit of bbPress? What do you think about stand-alone forums VS WordPress forum plugins? And is it good idea to open migration services to the new wpForo plugin, is it good for you?

I attached some screenshot of wpForo.

Thanks!

 

[Bill Statler]

Simpleress

SimplePress is the only one that I have any experience with, and you unintentionally expressed my opinion of it. It's functional. I find moderation (even simple spam removal) to be cumbersome. Luckily (?) the forum attracts maybe 1 non-spam post per month, I suppose because the users don't much care for it either.

The site owner wanted to replace it with different forum software, but the amount of labor was prohibitive, so we're just keeping it running as a sort of zombie forum.

 

[Tecca]

bbPress is very flexible if you know how to code for it, but takes a lot of time and effort to get anywhere near a full-fledged forum solution. Otherwise, I'd opt for a standalone like XenForo and bridge it with WordPress.

wpForo looks really interesting, I'll have to check it out.

 

[gConverter]

The site owner wanted to replace it with different forum software, but the amount of labor was prohibitive, so we're just keeping it running as a sort of zombie forum.

We at gConverter offer more than 67,600 from/to migration combinations with 260 different CMS/Forums. And I've already worked on dozens of SimplePress migration projects. I don't think it's too hard. SimplePress is the first complete and powerful WordPress forum plugin so there are thousands of SP users. But according to our statistic about 40% of all SP migrations are "From" SimplePress, and this becomes more and more. The only problem I saw is the target WP forum plugin. There wasn't any forum plugin which could support whole SP database. All WP plugins are very simple and lightweight. Now I see a very nice target forum for pro-forum migrations. wpForo provides with almost all pro-forum components, functions and features for free. Even more, there are many bridges for XenForo and Vanilla forums. So you can use those together with WordPress.

bbPress is very flexible if you know how to code for it, but takes a lot of time and effort to get anywhere near a full-fledged forum solution. Otherwise, I'd opt for a standalone like XenForo and bridge it with WordPress.

Agree... bbPress is like a flexible forum matrix. You can extend it using bbPress plugins as well. It has extensions for almost all necessary functions. So I love bbPress. This forum on top of migration statistic and only 23.5% of all bbPress migrations are "From" migrations. But bbPress has no chance to become a full-fledged forum solution like XenForo, even with dozens of plugins it looks not good and not complete.

I'd like to talk about QA forums as well. AnsPress, CM Answers, DW Question & Answer and wpForo Q&A. As far as i know there is no stand-alone QA forum software. This kind of forums are very useful for support discussions. So, most of small businesses witch have "Support Community" use QA solution on their websites. This kind of forums focused on questions and answers and provide with answer voting/marking features. Big "forum guys" like XenForo, vBulletin and phpBB don't support this nice format.

 

[Okoji]

I will like to check this out on my blog. How do I get a copy?

 

[gConverter]

I will like to check this out on my blog. How do I get a copy?

If you're talking about wpForo, it's available for free download on WordPress Plugin Directory.
Here is a direct link to plugin page: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpforo/

 

[DanielGarneau]

Hello everyone, long time no see!

My WordPress web site has a companion PhpBB forum. A couple of weeks ago, I received alerts from Google Search Console complaining that my WordPress web site was not AMP compatible, and that this had a negative impact on how I would rate with search engines. Other alerts indicated that some of the files contained within my PhpBB forum were outdated.

So, I went to work, first, by making my site AMP compatible. This was a much more elaborate process than one might think, since I relied on the Twenty-Ten fixed dimension WordPress theme. I had to experiment a lot with a certain number of WordPress themes and plugins before coming to the quite simple solution I have now adopted: Twenty-Sixteen WordPress theme with AMP plugin, and a few other technical adjustments.

Then, it seemed I would have to update PhpBB to the most recent version now available. But the majority of my mods were outdated and deemed no longer compatible. Last time I did a similar update required a lot of leg work, and I was not very keen on the idea of doing this again.

So, I decided to investigate some means to run my forum from within WordPress, if at all possible. All of this led me to wpForo, and go2wpForo plugins. I installed both on a development version of my site, and was able to import my PhpBB forum into wpForo without any problem at all.

I'm currently testing wpForo's functionalities and stability, which led me to visiting TAZ today, hoping to find what others have to say about implementing their forums through that wpForo. Any input will be appreciated.

Regards,

 

[Alpha1]

So far I'm still using XenForo with WordPress. I may move a site to BuddyBoss. I've looked at WPForo but it has not convinced me. I don't see anyone migrating from full featured paid software like XenForo, IPS or BuddyBoss to WPForo. (with the exception of vbulletin) Looking at their migratrion forum, there do not seem to be many going from MyBB to WPForo either. I think when coming from PhpBB then WPFORO can be a logical choice.

 

[DanielGarneau]

I finally went from Phpbb to wpForo. I used their phpbb to wpForo migration tool, and it carried all my data over without a glitch. I then used a redirection plugin to help me redirect every thread from my former forum to the new. I then worked at connecting the available French translation that was available. That too worked quite well. Now I am trying to resolve some issues with editing old or new posts as an admin.

 

[Icedout372]

I had simplepress for awhile, but not a whole lot of features like standard forum software, I tend to do a bridge between xenforo or vbulletin.