Useful Plugins for your bbPress Forum

To support our php script users at finalwebsites.com, we’re using bbpress for more than a year now. bbpress is a great peace of software and is based on WordPress, that will say if you’re able to write code for  WordPress you can code the same way for bbpress. There are several WordPress plugins which work with bbpress out of the box! Since the release of version 1.0 we have integrated bbpress into our own layout to make it a 100% part of our PHP resource site.

Why a forum and not just email support and why bbpress?

As a software developer you get most common support questions more than once. Sharing information is useful for others and a forum is a great platform for user support. bbpress is a very basic forum without heavy stuff like personal messaging and is very fast even with lots of users / posts. We like the WordPress/bbpress API very much and it’s quite easy to add extra functionality. Sure there are still lot of features missing like merging topics or other important moderator stuff, but I’m sure the developers of bbress are on the right way. There is one more thing with bbpress, the system is able to work with the same user base as WordPress. That will say you can connect your blog with your forum site, a great feature for communities.

Optimizing bbpress using plugins

bbpress SEO Tools
One of the most important requirements for our forum was search engine optimization (SEO). Great search engine positions in Google are great for all websites and for a support forum it’s more than important. Using this plugin it’s possible to index only the topic (sub)pages and the main page of course. All other views are for Google (and others) just content duplication and get marked by the plugin as “NoIndex”.

Moderator Notification
bbpress is using Akismet to protect your forum against spam, but for new forums it’s very important to know all new activities. This plugin sends an email message about new posts to all forum moderators.

Auto Add Favorites
bbpress has a different “Post subscribe” function, a user has to add a topic to his favorites for further watching. This plugin is the missing function to add favorites automatically. Check also this article on how-to subscribe to a bbpress forum.

Google Sitemap Generator
A Sitemap for Google is an important feature for SEO, you need to tell search engines about your sites content. This plugin is a great addition if you use the bbpress SEO tools, the plugin creates the same URLs as the pages marked for “Index” by the SEO plugin. If you need a more “general” sitemap plugin, check this one.

If you have questions about the plugins above, please post to our bbpress forum.

More bbpress plugins (3rd party)

Comment Quicktags for bbPress
The core version of bbpress has no extra options in their reply/post box, it’s just a textarea. A lot of html markup is allowed and this plugin will add some buttons to the form which helps users writing “nice” postings. This plugin is very old, but it works for the current version (1.02).

Human Test for bbPress
There are several plugins to limit registrations by bots and spammer. I like this one because it’s better integrated than others and it’s easier to handle by new members than ReCaptcha validation for example.

Related Topics
We know the related blog post plugins from WordPress, this one works the same way and for a forum it’s very useful. It is great for inter-linking (SEO) and it helps members to find related topics very fast. This plugin works much better if your forum has enough tags set for each topic.

EDIT: I disabled the related topics plugin yesterday for my forum because it stopped working. I will post an update if found a solution.

SMTP mailer for bbPress
The email function used by the core version is already based on phpmailer, but is still using PHP’s mail() function. It seems that many passwords send after registration, never reached the inbox from the new member. Many bbpress users solved this while using this plugin to send mail messages via SMTP.

Social It
These days social sites are a great way to share content with others. This plugin is also based on a WordPress plugin and is a great addition for your forum.

We use these plugins at finalwebsites.com together with the recent version of bbpress. They are compatible even with our custom template for bbpress. Some of them need tiny modifications in the template files. If you like to see more custom bbpress modifications check our bbpress forum section and find much more bbpress plugins on the bbpress site.