Having active forums on your WordPress website can be very helpful as it grows your online community and strengthens its ties to your website.
In this article, we’ll explain how to use the bbPress plugin to set up forums on your WordPress website.
What is the bbPress plugin?
bbPress is one of the best WordPress plugins that allow you to add forum functionality to your WordPress site. It is a free and open-source WordPress plugin, that adds a full-featured forum functionality to your whole website or any part you choose to put it on.
How to use the bbPress WordPress plugin
This quick guide is a tutorial on how to use the bbPress WordPress plugin. Since bbPress is free on WordPress, you can easily install it like any other free WordPress plugin.
After installation, you’ll have to configure your forum on your website. To configure your forum using bbPress, go to Settings and then, to Forums. Three custom post types will display by the left of the screen: individual forums, topics, and replies. If you go to “Forums” then click on “New Forum”, you’ll be able to add an individual forum category and set its parent (optional) and visibility.
By default, your main forum listing will be located at “yourdomain.com/forums”. But if you’d like to change that, you can modify the various URL slugs by going to Settings to Forums and looking for the Forum Root Slug, Single Forum Slugs and Forum User Slugs options.
Use bbPress to add functionality
While it’s absolutely free to use regular WordPress plugins on your bbPress forum, you can also find lots of bbPress plugins that are built specifically to add functionality to the core bbPress plugin.
If you want to find these types of plugins, a good place to start your search is the official bbPress plugin listings.
