{"id":315,"date":"2018-03-21T22:18:34","date_gmt":"2018-03-21T21:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skytechng.com\/blog\/blog\/?p=315"},"modified":"2018-09-06T08:49:41","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T07:49:41","slug":"5-plugins-to-add-a-forum-to-your-wordpress-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skytechng.com\/blog\/wordpress\/5-plugins-to-add-a-forum-to-your-wordpress-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Plugins to Add a Forum to Your WordPress Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit:\u00a0Drew Hendricks<\/span><\/p>\n

Web forums may seem like a relic of the early 2000s and earlier, when they were the primary means of creating social groups online. Before every blog had a comment section, before social networks with the Big Thing, there was\u00a0Usenet<\/a>. Usenet and other spinoff newsgroups were in many ways the prototype for what web forums eventually became, and web forums eventually morphed into social networks.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the prevalence of social networks today, why would you want to implement a web forum into your website? Well, there are a few reasons. For one thing, it\u00a0allows you to build your community in one central location<\/strong>\u00a0that you control, as opposed to one that other people control. A Facebook page or group, a LinkedIn Group, these sorts of social boards can be perfectly fine if you\u2019re willing to relinquish control.<\/span><\/p>\n

With a forum on your own site, though, you get to\u00a0customize and control it completely.<\/strong>\u00a0You can choose your URL and you can integrate it well with your site directly. You can skin it to look however you like, to match your branding and make sure people know they\u2019re still on your site. You can moderate it how you see fit, and don\u2019t have to worry about going through the Facebook support or any other bureaucratic group to get problem users banned or spam removed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, using your own web forum is not without its issues. Forums often require some knowledge of databases and code, particularly if you want to customize them. You might need to learn PHP and mySQL in order to work with forum data. You have to make sure you\u2019re keeping everything up to date and secure, which might involve buying your own SSL for administration pages and who knows what else. It can be quite a hassle to set up.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re running WordPress, however, you can actually set up a web forum a lot more easily. As you might imagine, there are WordPress plugins that do just about everything, up to and including adding web forum functionality to your website as it already stands.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve done some research and found\u00a0five pretty good forum plugins<\/strong>\u00a0for you to investigate, along with my personal pros and cons for each of them. It should be noted, though, that I have not personally built a community around each of them, so there may be some usage quirks or bugs that I didn\u2019t experience in my minor testing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, and as for why you would want a forum at all, as opposed to just a mailing list, social profile and group, hashtag, and\u00a0blog comments<\/a>\u00a0setup most other bloggers have\u2026 well, I don\u2019t know. Here are a few possibilities:<\/span><\/p>\n