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Wordpress Forum Integration With bbPress
Can you integrate a simple forum into your Wordpress blog and allow users to have the same login for the blog and the forum, all without messing around with Wordpress plugins and theme modifications?
Yes, you can. The answer, as I discovered on Lorelle’s blog, is NOT a Wordpress plugin.
It’s bbPress, another venture by the same great gang that gave Wordpress to the world.
On the surface, it appears to be easy to install and looks very much like the design of Wordpress official sites and forums. That goes without saying, of course 
However, if you’re not into trial-and-error, it’s best to wait for the next version of bbPress to arrive. If you decide you want to try this now, read the documentation properly, and you may also want to refer to this guide by Devlounge.
I installed mine and for some reason or another can’t seem to login:
While there has been some independent developers creating forum plugins for Wordpress, bbPress allows you to integrate the forum user database nicely into the Wordpress user database.
In other words, people use the same login for your forum and for posting comments on your Wordpress blogs. As far as themes go, the current version of bbPress does not offer many options, although a Wordpress-style theme selector is promised in the near future.
If you want to get your hands dirty, you can use the customizable template files and make it fit right in to your existing wordpress blog theme.
One feature I love about bbPress is the usage of tags:
I’m too tired and sleep to do all the work today, so my wish for tomorrow is to be able to:
- Troubleshoot the login error
- Customize the header and footer
- Integrate the RSS feeds into my blog’s feeds maybe?
Then again, I’m still busy with the existing forum, the directory and the new membership site I’m about to develop. So I could end up just paying someone to do this for me.
The existing forum is already using VBullettin, and I have no intention of switching over to bbPress for this site at least. For new sites though, bbPress is definitely an attractive options simply because:
- It works with Wordpress, my prefferred publishing platform
- It’s free, unlike VBullettin
- It looks clean and simple unlike PHPBB
Another excellent tool is introduced to the Internet marketing community. Great
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Gobala Krisnan is a direct-response marketer turned blogger who makes over $10,000 a month from his blog empire. If you want to make money online from blogs, he is the only person who can reveal the secret of merging time-tested direct marketing strategies with web 2.0 traffic. Read more about him >>
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