Bulletin boards and forums are good old reliable tools to build online communities. There are plenty of open source forum softwares that you can install on your website. However, if you are running a WordPress site then integrating a third party forum with WordPress can be a mess. bbPress is the answer to that problem. In this article, we will show you how to add a forum in WordPress with bbPress.
What is bbPress?
bbPress is a forum software built the WordPress way. It uses your existing WordPress core which makes it really easy to add a forum in WordPress with bbPress. It is extensible, so you can add additional add-on plugins to extend the functionality. bbPress is light-weight and faster than other popular open source forum softwares.
How to install bbPress
bbPress is available as a WordPress plugin. You can install it like you would install any other WordPress plugin. Simply log in to your WordPress admin area and go to Plugins » Add New . Search for bbPress and then select bbPress from results. Install and activate the plugin. Upon activation you will see the welcome screen for bbPress.
Creating a Forum with bbPress in WordPress
Once installed, bbPress adds Forums, Topics and Replies menu items in your WordPress admin.
Click on Forum » New Forum. This will take you to a screen similar to WordPress post edit area. Provide a title for your forum and enter a little description of it. Then press the publish button.
Displaying bbPress Forum in the Front End of WordPress
Now that you have created a few forums, it is time to display those forums on the front end of your WordPress website. Create a new WordPress page. Give this page a title, like Forum, Community, Support Forums, etc. Paste the following shortcode in your page:
[bbp-forum-index]
Turn off comments and trackbacks on this page and then publish it.
Go to Appearance » Menus and add this page to your navigation menu.
Now when a user clicks on this page, it will show your main forum index.
Integrating bbPress with your WordPress Theme
In most cases, you would probably want to open your forum for new registrations. To do that you need to open your website for registrations.
Go to Settings » General, check the box next to “Any one can register” to allow registrations on your website.
Now that your website is open for registration, the first thing that your forum participants would look for is a registration page. To create this simply create a WordPress page, and give it a title, e.g. Register. Add shortcode [bbp-register] and publish the page.
Another page your users would need is the lost password recovery page. Create another WordPress page, give it a title e.g. Lost Password. Add this shortcode to the page [bbp-lost-pass] and publish the page.
bbPress comes with a handful of widgets. Go to Appearance » Widgets to check those widgets. The most important widget that you would need is the (bbPress) Login Widget. Drag and drop Login Widget to your sidebar or any other widget area. Enter the URI(s) for the registration and lost password pages and save the widget.
Now a login form with links to registration and lost password recovery pages will appear in your sidebar. Logged in users would see their usernames and a log out link instead of the form.
Managing bbPress Forum Settings
Unlike other popular forum software, bbPress has a very simplified configuration page. To manage settings for your bbPress forums, go to Settings » Forums. This is the bbPress settings page from where you can control several aspects of your forum.
The first option you would see on Forums Settings page is “Disallow editing after”. Default option for this setting is 5 minutes. This setting allows Forum participants to edit their posts after publishing. After this time they will no longer be able to edit their posts. However, a forum Keymaster or Moderator can over ride this setting.
The second option “Throttle posting every” 10 seconds is basically a forum flood protection measure. It allows you to control after how much time a new post should appear on the forum.
On the settings page you can configure forum and topic slug as well as the number of topics and posts to appear per page. You can also allow users to subscribe to topics or add topics as favorites.
User Roles in bbPress
bbPress comes with five pre-defined roles, each with different capabilities.
1. Keymaster – The website owner or the WordPress administrator is automatically assigned the Keymaster role when they install bbPress. A Keymaster can delete and create forums, can create, edit, delete all posts, topics, forums.
2. Moderators – Users with moderator user role have access to moderation tools, which they can use to moderate forums, topics, and posts.
3. Participants – This is the default user role, participants can create and edit their own topics and posts, they can favorite and subscribe to topics.
4. Spectators – Spectators have a read only access to public forums, topics and posts.
5. Blocked – When a user is blocked all their capabilities are blocked. They can still read publicly viewable topics and posts, but can not participate in the forums.
That is just how easy it is to create a forum in WordPress with bbPress. Ofcourse you can add other functionality by using over 100+ different bbPress plugins.
We hope that this article helped you learn how to add a forum in WordPress and how to install and configure bbPress. If you have any questions, best practice tips for working with bbPress or any other feedback, then please leave a comment below.
I was wondering if you knew of a way to customize the backend section of bbpress for users. Like removing the admin bar and removing the standard wordpress information on the profile page.
Thanks a lot .. this is helpful (y)
Hi there!
I want to use bbpress on my WordPress website, I have an issue though. My website is hosted through WordPress so it doesn’t have a plugins option, how do I go about creating a forum?
Gary
Reading one of your other articles I have found out that I’m unable to do anything with my site, I’ll have to look at mving it to .org
Thanks for this great tutorial. Was wondering if with bbpress, we can add a link above the comment form like’ you must be logged in to comment’.
Am I blind or does bbPress still not support Facebook IDs? Why would any random guy coming to my site wanna register YET ANOTHER id when he’s probably already logged on to both FB and Twitter in other tabs of his browser?
Bb-team, let go of your pride and implement native support for Facebook (and G+ maybe?) now.
Pretty sure you can use plugins like Simple Facebook Connect (which allows user login). Would need a little bit of customization. To clarify your point, this is not a pride thing. bbPress is an open source software. Anyone and everyone is allowed to make suggestions, create plugins and so on. There is another plugin like that can do this:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/loginradius-for-wordpress/
Just came here from the WPEngine tweet. I have to leave a comment to thank you for this article. I’ve been contemplating adding a forum to my site but wasn’t sure which kind of forum was best. You not only convicted me that bbpress was a great solution but you explained how to use it.
Thanks again.
Can bb Press be used to replace a members area on a website, seeing that it has a registration portal to participate and hence can it be private to members only or do you have to put it insite a members area?
It has potentials for it depending on what you want to do with it. It is great for private support or anything forum related. But if you are talking about premium content, then it is probably better to use another membership plugin.
That’s great – thanks!
Hi! I have almost the same installation as you but I’ve got a problem:
as a moderator or even a keymaster in bbpress, I don’t have access to the WordPress admin panel to Add forum or Delete forum. In the admin panel I only have “New – Topic” Or “Reply”. The only way I can add a forum is creating a specific page with the add forum shortcode, and there is no way to delete a forum. Would you have an idea for me? Thank you!
Site admins are usually assigned the keymaster role. Are you talking about that you created a new user and just gave them that role?
Thank you for answering!
Yes I created a new user, and give him the keymaster forum role, and I don’t change WP role, which is Subscriber by default. I want don’t want this user to modify anything else but the forum.
In bbPress User Roles and Capabilities is written:
Keymaster – can create, edit and delete other users’ forums, topics and replies. Can manage Tags, and moderate a forum with the moderation tools.
Moderator – can create and edit forums. Can create, edit and delete other users’ topics and replies. Can manage Tags, and moderate a forum with the moderation tools.
Indeed they have autorisations to create and delete forums, but the only way I found to create a forum is to create a new page with in it the bbpress shortcode
[bbp-forum-form] – Display the ‘New Forum’ form.
And I found no way to delete forums.
I thought moderator and keymasters would be allowed to see the forum menu in the wordpress admin panel, but that is not the case. Any idea on how to do that?
Wow! This seems to be such an easy and great way to add forum in wordpress. Wonderful and detail explanation, it is very helpful. Thanks for sharing
Thanks for this excellent write-up about bbpress, perfect timing as I’m about to deploy it, but I am still choosing between installing bbpress within my existing wordpress installation, or installing it on a new wordpress installation inside a subdomain like forum.foreclosurephilippines.com. I’m planning to use a subdomain for easier backup/restore and I want the forum and blog to be physically separate to isolate resource usage, security, etc. Do you think this is necessary or am I just being paranoid?
Another thing, for Genesis users, do we need to install bbPress Genesis Extend?
Offtopic: what happened to facebook login here in the comments section?
It is a matter of preference really. If you want to utilize user registration in multiple ways (i.e have special perks for registered users), then it makes a lot of sense to have it altogether. It also makes it easier for registered users to comment (i.e have the same identity etc). If you don’t want that, then you can most definitely run it as a separate install. Security shouldn’t be an issue either way and if it is, then you have bigger things to worry about then this decision
As for bbPress Genesis Extend, it would be a nice addition. However it may not be required.
Lastly for the FB login, we decided to get rid of it mainly because not many people used it.
Thanks for the reply guys. I deployed bbpress on my test site and I was done in about 5 minutes and I got it working fast and painless, thanks to your article!
With regards to security with bbpress, I almost forgot, I am a sucuri user, so it really should not be an issue right? I did notice that sucuri can sometimes be too strict where legit blog commenters are denied access and it seems it’s because they are using a common IP address that might have had rogue activities before (imagine a big company behind a firewall where thousands use one IP address, and with one rogue computer/user) and I see it might cause the same behavior with bbpress.
As always, thanks for the info guys, really helpful!
Yup Sucuri keeps you covered. Unfortunately for the sake of a better security, it does sometimes block legit users.
I’d like to follow-up on ethans comment above.
The BBpress plugin is tapping into the current WP database correct?
If so I imaging that it’ll be increasing the SQL size and usage a lot too. Especially with popular blogs/forums.
Has anyone done research this in regards to hosting issues etc? It would be great to install a forum as easy as this to coincide with WP in terms of memberships as well etc I just wonder if the resources are too much for many hosting platforms?
Yes, you are correct that the SQL size will increase. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that resource consumption will increase. Resources required will increase as your traffic increases. Unless you are getting thousands of posts every hour, you don’t have to be worried about resource consumption.
Hi,
My blog is now open tu registrations. I’m just wondering if the old registered users will be able to log in to bbpress forums using the same credendials?
Useful write up, as always.
I know you mentioned its light weight and faster then other forums available but do you have any extra advice on improving the speed. I have always found forums to be far to bulky.