Description
Are you looking for a timeless, elegant, and streamlined discussion board? bbPress is easy to integrate, easy to use, and is built to scale with your growing community.
bbPress is intentionally simple yet infinitely powerful forum software, built by contributors to WordPress.
Screenshots
Forums - Admin Interface 
Topics - Admin Interface 
Replies - Admin Interface 
Settings - Admin Interface 
Settings 2 - Admin Interface 
Themes - Admin Interface 
Single Forum - Default Theme
Installation
From your WordPress dashboard
- Visit ‘Plugins > Add New’
- Search for ‘bbPress’
- Activate bbPress from your Plugins page. (You will be greeted with a Welcome page.)
From WordPress.org
- Download bbPress.
- Upload the ‘bbpress’ directory to your ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory, using your favorite method (ftp, sftp, scp, etc…)
- Activate bbPress from your Plugins page. (You will be greeted with a Welcome page.)
Once Activated
- Visit ‘Forums > Add New’ and create some forums. (You can always delete these later.)
- If you have pretty permalinks enabled, visit example.com/forums/, or if you do not have pretty permalinks enabled, visit example.com?post_type=forum
- Visit ‘Settings > Forums’ and configure the settings to best match the needs of your community.
- Visit ‘Tools > Forums > Import Forums’ if you have an existing forum to convert to bbPress.
Once Configured
- bbPress comes with a robust theme-compatibility API that does its best to make bbPress look and feel right with just-about any WordPress theme. You may need to adjust some styling on your own to make everything look pristine.
- You may want to customize the register/activation/sign-in/lost-password flows, to better suit your site. bbPress comes with a bevy of shortcodes to make this possible, listed here: https://codex.bbpress.org/shortcodes/
- bbPress also comes with built-in support for Akismet and BuddyPress, two very popular and very powerful WordPress plugins. If you’re using either, visit your Forum Settings page and ensure that integration appears correct.
Reviews
August 6, 2021
If you've ever used other forums software, or especially if you've deployed other forums software, it becomes very clear after you install bbpress that this plugin is basic, and clunky. An awful lot of what would be considered standard functionality in forums software simply isn't present, or if it is, is awkward and clunky to use.
Having said that, it is the best forums plugin I am aware of for WordPress, perhaps the only one, and it is FOSS, so hurrah for that, and it mostly does the job. There are also plugins available for it that extend it's functionality and add features which almost put it on a par with other forums software, but even with those, not quite.
April 21, 2021
Helpful plugin, good functionality.
January 20, 2021
bbPress is powerfull and it integrates well with buddypress. I huge recommend it!
December 31, 2020
OOB the forum looks very raw and absolutely DOES NOT follow the active theme. It also produced some artifacts that the dev refused to even look into.
December 14, 2020
Bonjour,
BBpress est un chouette programme, le souci est que je suis obligé de revenir à la version 2.5.14 car dès que je passe à l'une des versions récentes le forum rencontre de nombreux soucis, pb horodatage, sujets qui disparaissent, édition d'un post impossible sans perdre le sujet complet, bref, compliqué !
Je précise que j'ai changé d'hébergeur et de thème ces derniers mois... c'est bien BBPRESS le souci...
J'attends la version 2.6.7 avec espoir...
October 28, 2020
I had installed this to test it out and had deactivated it, and it broke admin access to my site, twice, overwriting permissions for my admin account.
NEVER touching this plugin again, especially after reading that this has been an ongoing issue for years now. Cost me a lot of time and effort, not to mention IT fees in order to diagnose the issue so that I could access the admin tools to delete it.
Goodbye! I will be sure to find your other plugins and avoid them as well.
Contributors & Developers
“bbPress” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“bbPress” has been translated into 51 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “bbPress” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
Check out the releases page