5 Best WordPress Forum Plugins

Posted: 18 Dec 2011 07:11 AM PST

wordpress forum plugins

Bloggers create their own forums to answer the reader questions in a more engaging way than the default blog commenting system. WordPress allows you to create customized light weight forums within a matter of seconds simply by using any of the best forum plugins available.

Following are the best WordPress forum plugins to convert the blog into a discussion site:

bbPress

bbPress is the most popular and widely used forum plugin from the WordPress family. Features like ease of integration, ease of use, web standards and the speed make it top among the list of WordPress forum plugins.
bbPress Features:

Fast and light
Simple interface
Customizable templates
Highly extensible
Spam protection
RSS Feeds

Mingle Forum

Mingle Forum is another lightweight, solid, secure, quick to setup, easy to use WordPress forum plugin with some more features than bbPress.
Mingle Forum Features:

Create a corresponding Forum post when you create a post
User Signatures
Image Uploads on posts
SEO Friendly URLs
Forum sitemap
Adsense areas
Media embedding
User Groups
User Levels like newbie, beginner, pro.
Private Messages
Forum RSS Feeds
Email notifications on replies to topics

Simple:Press

Simple:Press is an integrated and fully scalable forum plugin for WordPress. It is an highly customizable wordpress forum plugin to turn your WordPress into a discussion community.
Features:

Supports WordPress 3.0 standard and multisite
Optional Cookies to track Guests and Members
Complete uninstall/removal option
Comprehensive Admin Options and Settings
Underpinned by a powerful user and permission system
Can create private and/or public forums
Optional Spam Prevention tool
Coded to use WordPress secure routines
Feature to prevent user access to wp admin
Creates pretty/seo friendly permalinks
Support for the All In One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemap Plugins
Page and Browser Title Settings
Canonical URL's
Custom descriptions and keywords

Tal.ki Embeddable Forums

Tal.ki Embeddable WordPress plugin add a forums page to your blog and allow your members to start their own conversations and topics on your WordPress. The forums comes with global login systems such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and a dozen others.
Features: