I spent the night last night installing a really cool (and free) forum tool to a WordPress Site I’m working on.
Simple:Press WordPress Forum Installation
So far it seems to be really easy to install and set up. The installation includes various levels of interactivity from administrator to guest as well as functions allowing for private forums, etc. There’s also no need to worry about coding specific CSS for them, though you may want to. The install contains everything you need.
It took a while to find so I felt it necessary to share this one. There are other options out there like Xforum, etc but I was unable to get any of the installs to work. Most were written around 2006 for a much older version of WordPress. Simple:Press is an up-to-date plug-in that’s so much more.
The installation is fairly easy as well, though as to be expected with any forum addition it takes time to set up everything. To install simply upload the full extracted directory, and once uploaded go to your plug-ins page and activate it. Once that’s completed you’re not quite there yet. You’ll then see “Forum” on the left bar in your WordPress admin panel similar to “Pages” and “Posts”. Click the activation link and you’re good to go!
Thanks for the great work on this guys, this looks to be the perfect solution for adding a complete user forum to a WordPress installation.