If you want your blog to be a place where people hang out, you’re surely going to need a forum.
It’s the forum where your subscribers and readers would be able to converse with you and others.
Since it’s going to be a niche blog, the forum could be considered as a niche forum; hence, plenty of people with questions related to the topic would land on your forum, thereby increasing the number of viewers to your blog.
Now, let’s take a look at the top 5 WordPress Forum Plugins
Mingle Forum
If you’re looking for a way to install your very own forum on WordPress, Mingle surely is a great choice. It was developed as to provide something that is easy to use and dependent on what the forum owners want to see.
It’s got plenty of features such as categories, groups, forum search, private messages, user levels, you can assign moderators to your forums, notify people of new posts, widgets, sticky topics and much more. Moreover, this form also supports plenty of languages. Therefore, it’s definitely one of the best forum plugins that you would find when it comes to WordPress blogs.
Tal.ki Embedded Forums
This is surely the best forum plugin for today’s blogs; because, when you enable this plugin, your visitors would be able to share individual topics onto their Facebook Walls and twitter feeds – thereby drawing more traffic to your blog. Another added benefit of this plugin is the fact that it is self-adjusted; you don’t need to worry about the theme and style of your WP blog.
WP –Forum
This is by far the most popular amongst the Forum Plugins for WordPress and it supports various skins and provides all admins the power to toggle guest posting – on and off. Since this plugin is made entirely for WordPress it’s really easy to integrate and administer – even first time users will find it a breeze.
Simple Press
These plugins are totally customizable and there are plenty of free add-ons and skins that you could utilize in order to beautify and enhance your forum. It’s got the capability of allowing your users to use a signature and even a bio.
Using it you can create both public as well as private forums and users also have the option to upload their own avatar. Since it’s SEO friendly you don’t need to worry about ranking and stuff. If you want to know who is online, the forum is great as it tells you just that.
BBPress
Earlier it was the best WP forum plugin available and that’s the reason most of the established sites use it. It’s still great and you can easily set it up and customize it to your liking.
Therefore, we see that there are plenty of options available when it comes to Forum plugins for WordPress blogs. Hence, there’s nothing stopping you from creating a forum that is user as well as webmaster friendly and at the same time, one that is appealing to the eyes as well as search engines.
There are so many WordPress plugines which makes life esay for the website owner.
Abhishek enjoys working on WordPress websites and assists a number of his clients with wordpress theme development
photo credit: photosteve101
