Hi, I’m setting up a membership site and I want to include a forum - bbpress looks good to me and so does buddypress… comments? Suggestions? Thanks!
Free Forum Recommendations?
How simple or complex do you need this to be?
I’ve been having problems with bbPress lately on a couple of sites. I switched the forums out for WP Foro. No more problems (I was getting 500 errors all over the forums after updating to WordPress 4.8. I can’t say there’s a compatibility problem, just that it started then and Siteground tech support said it looked like the problem was bbPress itself.The problems stopped when I got rid of bbPress.) As a bonus, wpForo was easier to configure and, in my opinion, more attractive.
I agree 100% with @JediShark that it’s better to steer clear of bbPress. It seems to me to very very buggy.
I agree too that wpForo looks nice. I still wouldn’t use it, though. The main problem, as I pointed out to its devs a long time ago, is that it doesn’t use custom post types. This makes it quite difficult to integrate with other plugins, especially membership plugins, unless you are happy to make the whole forum publicly accessible.
The other problem is that its devs have a history of bloating what start out as promising plugins. Just look at wpDiscuz. It’s ridiculously heavy, slow to load, and very difficult to customize. It claims to be a native WP commenting plugin but, as I’ve seen someone else say, it’s really just like a third party system.
Asgaros Forum is, in my view, a much better bet, with a much more responsive developer. It’s also much faster under load. But it still doesn’t use custom post types.
My recommendation, if you are happy with something simple, would be Discussion Board. This is simplicity itself to configure, and does use custom post types so is easily managed by s2Member. It handles responses by treating them as comments, so there’s even no added complexity there.
The problem with plugins that allow for more complexity while also using custom post types is that those on offer tend to be buggy. In my own case, I have customized both an old version of Anspress and the current version of DW Question Answer. They now work perfectly on my sites, and I can manage access easily using s2Member.
Anspress brought out a wholly new version just a couple of months ago, which I have not tested, but in which they claim to have made huge improvements to performance. If you want the full range of forum functions and full integration with s2Member, I’d suggest starting there. (That’s what I’d do if I had to build a new site right now and Discussion Board wasn’t enough.)
Otherwise, I’d go for DW Question Answer and, if you hit an issue, look in their support forums. I have posted all my fixes there!
Or just use Discussion Board.
Simple… more than q&a, but simple please…
sorry, I answered the phone… this is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for… huge thanks to all of you and let me know how I can help.
I am using bbpress and have had no issue so far.
Thanks… good to know.
I started to set up wpforo then ran into info on their forum that it doesn’t play well with S2. If you want, I can find those links.
And yes, didn’t think to look at this thread - thanks so much…