Forum is a great way for people to connect with each other, makes it easy for them to openly discuss a wide variety of topics, enhances the discussion areas under your posts, and also be used for customer support. Adding a forum to your WordPress site is very simple with plugins. There are many plugins with whom you can install and configure your forum but we recommend the bbPress plugin.
In this tutorial you will discuss about what is bbPress, why use bbPress and how to add forum in your WordPress site using bbPress.
Why You Need Forum?
Site owners constantly look for new and more effective ways to engage their target audiences. Implementing a forum is one of the best tried and tested methods to drive brand growth. Let’s see why____
1. Improve customer support:
One of the key benefits of having a forum is great customer support. It provides peer-to-peer self-service support, where support representatives and customers alike can share resolutions to common problems.
2. Build brand trust:
The forum creates an interactive space where members can share constructive criticism and praise alike. When brands openly give their customers a voice and show that they’re not afraid of criticism, people will be far more likely to trust them.
3. Increase customer success:
Forums can become full-fledged knowledge-sharing platforms that customers can use as a go-to reference for tips, guides, suggestions, and resolutions to common problems.
4. Drive product ideation:
Forums are perfect for crowdsourcing ideas and driving innovation. Members can share their favorite ideas for new products, features and services to help brands identify and capitalize on new opportunities.
5. Helps identify problems faster:
Businesses face many challenges when it comes to identifying problems with their products or services and managing their reputations. Another benefit of having a forum is that it allows businesses to identify problems faster. It helps customer support and product development teams to get immediate access to the information they need to address them.
What is bbPress?
bbPress is a WordPress plugin that adds forum functionality to the WordPress site. It was made by the developers of WordPress. It has since been turned into a plugin that can be installed, activated and configured as easily as any of the other popular plugins currently available to WP users.
Why Use bbPress?
As we know bbPress is developed by WordPress, so it’s a high-quality extension from a trustworthy and reliable source. It is free to use and provides everything needed to add discussion areas to your website. Also, one of the best reasons to choose bbPress is the large library of free and commercial add-ons available for it.
Moreover, this plugin works well with most of the popular WordPress themes so you don’t need to change themes to use it. It’s lightweight and fast compared to other popular open-source forum software. Also, easy to use, has customizable templates and spam support which made it an obvious choice for anyone compared to other similar plugins.
Install bbPress Plugin:
To add a forum using the bbPress plugin first step to do is installing and activating the bbPress plugin. As with any other plugin installation, simply go to ‘Plugins > Add New’.
Now, search for bbPress and click the ‘Install Now’ button once it shows up. As soon as you finish installing it, click Activate.
Creating Forum in WordPress Using bbPress:
Once you have successfully activated the bbPress plugin, you’ll notice new menu items Forums, Topics and Replies have been added to the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard.
Now, to add your first forum, click on ‘Forum > New Forum’. You’ll be taken to a page where you can add a title for your forum and forum description. On this page, you will also get some options to change the attributes of the forum.
Click the ‘Publish’ button to publish the forum.
Displaying Forum in the Front End of WordPress:
As you have created a new forum, now it is time to display the forum on the front end of your WordPress site.
To display the forum create a new pages add a title as your forum name and paste the following shortcode in that page:
[bbp-forum-index]
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Publish’ button to publish the page on your site. Now, you can visit the page to see the preview of your forum.
Next, you need to add your forum to your site menu. To do that, go to’ Appearance > Menus’ and add the forum page to the navigation menu.
Now, users can now access the forum index page by clicking on the link in the main menu.
Integrating bbPress Plugin with WordPress Theme:
Now, you may want to make sure other people can register and post in your forum. To do this go to ‘Settings > General’ and check the box next to ‘Anyone can register’ to allow registrations on your site.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save changes’ button to store your settings.
Next thing you need to do is to set up a few necessary pages to enable user registration and lost passwords.
Registration Page:
As you’ve enabled new registrations, you need to create a registration page. Create a new page, give it a title and add the following shortcode:
[bbp-register]
Then click ‘Publish’. This page will show a user registration form to all non-logged in users.
Lost Password Page:
In addition to the registration page, your forum members will also need a lost password page where they can reset their passwords. Create another new page, give it a title add the following shortcode and hit ‘Publish’.
[bbp-lost-pass]
bbPress also comes with some handy widgets. You’ll find them in your dashboard under ‘Appearance > Widgets’. These widgets include:
A forum search form
A login widget
Recent topics
Topic views
Forums list
Recent Replies
Statistics
You can drag these widgets into the sidebar of your site or any other appropriate area to create user navigation and functionality for your forum that is fully integrated into your main site. Although you don’t need to add all the widgets, adding the Login Widget is a must to make login easy for your forum members.
So, simply drag and drop Login Widget to your sidebar or any other widget area, choose a title, and enter URLs for both your registration and lost password pages. Finally, save the widget and you’ll have a login form in your sidebar.
Now, you’ll see a login form with links to Register and Lost Password pages below it. Logged-in users would see their usernames and a logout link instead of the form.
bbPress Forum Settings:
Configuring bbPress forum settings is quite easy. It can be managed by going to ‘Settings > Forums’ in your WordPress dashboard. Though the default settings will work for most forum websites you can change them in case you want. There are several settings sections on the settings page of bbPress. Let’s have a look at them:
Forum User Settings:
In this section first option, you will get to set an automatic forum role for your registered visitor. You can select a user role or uncheck the option there to manually assign user roles to each user when they register. The next option adds a delay between subsequent forum posts to prevent forum flooding and spam. You can increase or decrease the delay period here. The Editing option allows forum members to edit a post for a set period of time after they first publish it. The default setting is 5 minutes, but feel free to change it to whatever you’d like.
Forum Features:
You can check/uncheck the ‘Auto-embed links’ option to let forum users embed media from YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc. directly into topics and replies. You can enable threaded (nested) replies with specifying levels, allow topic and reply revision logging, allow users to mark topics as the favorite, allow users to subscribe to forum topics. Moreover, you can allow topics to have tags, forum-wide search, adding toolbar & buttons to textareas to help with HTML formatting. You will also get options for allowing forums to have dedicated moderators and allow Moderators, Keymasters to edit users.
Topics and Replies Per Page:
In this area, you can specify how many topics and replies to show on each page. The default of 15 should work just fine for both of these, but change them to suit your site’s needs.
Topics and Replies Per RSS Page:
Here, you can specify how many topics and replies appear on RSS pages. You can just leave the default setting of 25 for each of these as well.
Forum Root Slug:
You can specify a root that will appear in your forum permalinks here. The default is forums, but you can change it if you’d like. You can choose to disable the forum root, but this is NOT recommended. Also, you can choose either Forum Index or Topics by Freshness on ‘Forum root should show’ to adjust what is displayed on the main forum page.
Single Forum Slugs:
In this section of settings, you can custom slugs for single forums, for topics created in the forum, for post replies, tags, views, edit, and search.
Forum User Slugs:
Here you can select a general slug for forum users, for topics created in the forum, for post replies, for favorite forum topics and slug to be used for topic subscriptions.
bbPress Users Role:
bbPress comes with five default user roles. This allows you to assign users roles with different capabilities. These include:
Keymaster:
This user role is automatically assigned to the website owner or WordPress administrators when the bbPress plugin is installed. This user has complete control over the forum on your site. They can create and edit any topic, even the topics of other users. He can also manage tags, create new forums and access global settings.
Moderator:
This user has nearly all of the capabilities of a keymaster. Users of this role can moderate all forums, topics and posts. However, they cannot delete other users’ forums, nor can they access global settings.
Participant:
This user can create new topics and reply to existing topics, edit their own topics and posts and subscribe to topics.
Spectators:
In this role, you have limited, read-only access to public forums, topics and posts.
Blocked:
If a user is blocked, all of their posting abilities are suspended. A blocked user can still read public posts and topics, but is unable to participate.
Forum is a great way for people to connect with each other, makes it easy for them to openly discuss a wide variety of topics, enhances the discussion areas under your posts, and also be used for customer support. Adding a forum to your WordPress site is very simple with plugins. There are many plugins with whom you can install and configure your forum but we recommend the bbPress plugin.
In this tutorial you will discuss about what is bbPress, why use bbPress and how to add forum in your WordPress site using bbPress.
Why You Need Forum?
Site owners constantly look for new and more effective ways to engage their target audiences. Implementing a forum is one of the best tried and tested methods to drive brand growth. Let’s see why____
1. Improve customer support:
One of the key benefits of having a forum is great customer support. It provides peer-to-peer self-service support, where support representatives and customers alike can share resolutions to common problems.
2. Build brand trust:
The forum creates an interactive space where members can share constructive criticism and praise alike. When brands openly give their customers a voice and show that they’re not afraid of criticism, people will be far more likely to trust them.
3. Increase customer success:
Forums can become full-fledged knowledge-sharing platforms that customers can use as a go-to reference for tips, guides, suggestions, and resolutions to common problems.
4. Drive product ideation:
Forums are perfect for crowdsourcing ideas and driving innovation. Members can share their favorite ideas for new products, features and services to help brands identify and capitalize on new opportunities.
5. Helps identify problems faster:
Businesses face many challenges when it comes to identifying problems with their products or services and managing their reputations. Another benefit of having a forum is that it allows businesses to identify problems faster. It helps customer support and product development teams to get immediate access to the information they need to address them.
What is bbPress?
bbPress is a WordPress plugin that adds forum functionality to the WordPress site. It was made by the developers of WordPress. It has since been turned into a plugin that can be installed, activated and configured as easily as any of the other popular plugins currently available to WP users.
Why Use bbPress?
As we know bbPress is developed by WordPress, so it’s a high-quality extension from a trustworthy and reliable source. It is free to use and provides everything needed to add discussion areas to your website. Also, one of the best reasons to choose bbPress is the large library of free and commercial add-ons available for it.
Moreover, this plugin works well with most of the popular WordPress themes so you don’t need to change themes to use it. It’s lightweight and fast compared to other popular open-source forum software. Also, easy to use, has customizable templates and spam support which made it an obvious choice for anyone compared to other similar plugins.
Install bbPress Plugin:
To add a forum using the bbPress plugin first step to do is installing and activating the bbPress plugin. As with any other plugin installation, simply go to ‘Plugins > Add New’.
Now, search for bbPress and click the ‘Install Now’ button once it shows up. As soon as you finish installing it, click Activate.
Creating Forum in WordPress Using bbPress:
Once you have successfully activated the bbPress plugin, you’ll notice new menu items Forums, Topics and Replies have been added to the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard.
Now, to add your first forum, click on ‘Forum > New Forum’. You’ll be taken to a page where you can add a title for your forum and forum description. On this page, you will also get some options to change the attributes of the forum.
Click the ‘Publish’ button to publish the forum.
Displaying Forum in the Front End of WordPress:
As you have created a new forum, now it is time to display the forum on the front end of your WordPress site.
To display the forum create a new pages add a title as your forum name and paste the following shortcode in that page:
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Publish’ button to publish the page on your site. Now, you can visit the page to see the preview of your forum.
Next, you need to add your forum to your site menu. To do that, go to’ Appearance > Menus’ and add the forum page to the navigation menu.
Now, users can now access the forum index page by clicking on the link in the main menu.
Integrating bbPress Plugin with WordPress Theme:
Now, you may want to make sure other people can register and post in your forum. To do this go to ‘Settings > General’ and check the box next to ‘Anyone can register’ to allow registrations on your site.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save changes’ button to store your settings.
Next thing you need to do is to set up a few necessary pages to enable user registration and lost passwords.
Registration Page:
As you’ve enabled new registrations, you need to create a registration page. Create a new page, give it a title and add the following shortcode:
Then click ‘Publish’. This page will show a user registration form to all non-logged in users.
Lost Password Page:
In addition to the registration page, your forum members will also need a lost password page where they can reset their passwords. Create another new page, give it a title add the following shortcode and hit ‘Publish’.
bbPress also comes with some handy widgets. You’ll find them in your dashboard under ‘Appearance > Widgets’. These widgets include:
You can drag these widgets into the sidebar of your site or any other appropriate area to create user navigation and functionality for your forum that is fully integrated into your main site. Although you don’t need to add all the widgets, adding the Login Widget is a must to make login easy for your forum members.
So, simply drag and drop Login Widget to your sidebar or any other widget area, choose a title, and enter URLs for both your registration and lost password pages. Finally, save the widget and you’ll have a login form in your sidebar.
Now, you’ll see a login form with links to Register and Lost Password pages below it. Logged-in users would see their usernames and a logout link instead of the form.
bbPress Forum Settings:
Configuring bbPress forum settings is quite easy. It can be managed by going to ‘Settings > Forums’ in your WordPress dashboard. Though the default settings will work for most forum websites you can change them in case you want. There are several settings sections on the settings page of bbPress. Let’s have a look at them:
Forum User Settings:
In this section first option, you will get to set an automatic forum role for your registered visitor. You can select a user role or uncheck the option there to manually assign user roles to each user when they register. The next option adds a delay between subsequent forum posts to prevent forum flooding and spam. You can increase or decrease the delay period here. The Editing option allows forum members to edit a post for a set period of time after they first publish it. The default setting is 5 minutes, but feel free to change it to whatever you’d like.
Forum Features:
You can check/uncheck the ‘Auto-embed links’ option to let forum users embed media from YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc. directly into topics and replies. You can enable threaded (nested) replies with specifying levels, allow topic and reply revision logging, allow users to mark topics as the favorite, allow users to subscribe to forum topics. Moreover, you can allow topics to have tags, forum-wide search, adding toolbar & buttons to textareas to help with HTML formatting. You will also get options for allowing forums to have dedicated moderators and allow Moderators, Keymasters to edit users.
Topics and Replies Per Page:
In this area, you can specify how many topics and replies to show on each page. The default of 15 should work just fine for both of these, but change them to suit your site’s needs.
Topics and Replies Per RSS Page:
Here, you can specify how many topics and replies appear on RSS pages. You can just leave the default setting of 25 for each of these as well.
Forum Root Slug:
You can specify a root that will appear in your forum permalinks here. The default is forums, but you can change it if you’d like. You can choose to disable the forum root, but this is NOT recommended. Also, you can choose either Forum Index or Topics by Freshness on ‘Forum root should show’ to adjust what is displayed on the main forum page.
Single Forum Slugs:
In this section of settings, you can custom slugs for single forums, for topics created in the forum, for post replies, tags, views, edit, and search.
Forum User Slugs:
Here you can select a general slug for forum users, for topics created in the forum, for post replies, for favorite forum topics and slug to be used for topic subscriptions.
bbPress Users Role:
bbPress comes with five default user roles. This allows you to assign users roles with different capabilities. These include:
Keymaster:
This user role is automatically assigned to the website owner or WordPress administrators when the bbPress plugin is installed. This user has complete control over the forum on your site. They can create and edit any topic, even the topics of other users. He can also manage tags, create new forums and access global settings.
Moderator:
This user has nearly all of the capabilities of a keymaster. Users of this role can moderate all forums, topics and posts. However, they cannot delete other users’ forums, nor can they access global settings.
Participant:
This user can create new topics and reply to existing topics, edit their own topics and posts and subscribe to topics.
Spectators:
In this role, you have limited, read-only access to public forums, topics and posts.
Blocked:
If a user is blocked, all of their posting abilities are suspended. A blocked user can still read public posts and topics, but is unable to participate.
Hope this article helped you to add a forum in WordPress using bbPress and configure bbPress. If you still have any questions about adding a forum to your WordPress site using bbPress feel free to leave a comment below, we’ll try to help you out. You can also check our article on How to Show Different Sidebar on Different Posts and Pages and Turn On Dark Mode on Your WordPress Site and Admin Dashboard
Sidratul Sohrat