Enhance Your WordPress Site By Adding An Online Community Through bbPress In It

By Neha Yadav Our Bestseller: WordPress Themes

Online communities are now a days very popular and best medium to get connected with the world. A number of people form  communities and discuss lot many issues they are interested in. Actually it is well known to each of us that human being is a social animal, so no doubt we are always interested to be in a social network, where we can be updated and utilize our knowledge and time in a better approach. Also it is again a true fact that nobody is totally perfect in this world. One may be good and excellent in some fields, other may be in other fields. So by joining a community you get a network of lot many people sound in their professions, and from there you can acquire plenty of knowledge of every field you wanted to know about.

By sharing and discussing your thoughts, you make your thoughts more clear and clarify all your doubts even. Now when it comes to the word “Online” then it adds 4 stars to your community, as now you are not bounded to geographical limitations. People from all over the world may be connected to your community and easily share their common interest topics. So it is the most easier and accessible way to get connected to the world.

Advantages of “Online Communities” in your site : World Wide Platform and Exposure : When you create an online community on your site, people get a open platform to share and discuss their issues, thus in this way both the parties are benefited as people get their doubts resolved, their knowledge gets increases and thus resulting in traffic increment on your site. The more and more people visits your site to join the community, the more and more traffic comes on your site. This way you get a world wide exposure through your site. Community to Community Exposure : Once people joins your community, there may be great discussions over it. In this situation there are many people who are already a member of some other communities. Thus leads to community to community discussions and your site gets more and more exposure along with the discussions. Online Affiliates, Entrepreneurs and Customers : By building an online community you can easily get your affiliates, your customers and even some new entrepreneurs those are interested to join your business and can result in your profit. Opportunities and Relationships : Online communities provides a large number of opportunities for your business, all those people who are aware and all those who are unaware about you and your site gathers at a common platform and thus openings a number of gates for you of different opportunities and helps to build a strong relationships.

Now after knowing too much about the advantages of online communities, you must be eager to know how to build an online community on your WordPress site ?

Adding An Online Community on WordPress Site Through bbPress :

bbPress is an open source, light weight and faster forum software that can be easily implemented in WordPress to develop an online community. It is easy to be implemented, all the entire procedure to do so is almost just like adding a new plugin o your site.

Follow some simple below given steps and your site will be enhanced by an online community :

Step 1 : Firstly, go to your site’s dashboard. Select
Plugins -> Add New , search for bbPress and install it as shown below

Step 2 :  Secondly, activate this plugin. Upon activation a new screen will be displayed into your dashboard as shown below.

Step 3: Now 3 menus will be added to your dashboard- Forum, Topics and Replies as shown below -

Step 4: Now, click on
Forums -> New Forum . Adding a new forum is just like adding a new post in WordPress as shown below -

Step 5: After publishing this forum, you need to create a new page now where you need to embed a shortcode [bbp-forum-index] as shown below -

Step 6: Now go to
Appearance -> Menus , add this page to navigation menu. Create a new menu, and add this page to this menu. In this way whenever a user comes to your home page, clicking on the new menu he/she enters your community forum.

Step 7: Now you need to integrate bbPress with your theme, so that you can display registration form in front of new users and along with it you need to display a login page in front of registered users.

Adding Registration Form -

Go to
Settings -> General and click the check box where it is mentioned “Any one can register”.

Now once you allow registration on your site, you need to publish a page where registration can be done. For this create a new page name it “User Registration” and add a small shortcode into it [bbp-register] and simple click on publish as shown below -

Now you need to add two more pages i.e. Login page and Lost Password Recovery Page. So for adding lost password recovery page you again need to add a new WordPress page and name it as “Password Recovery” page.  Create it and  publish the page by adding a small shortcode again into it [bbp-lost-pass], as shown below -

Now you need to display a Login area from where your visitor can login into your forum. For that you need to go to
Appearance – > Widgets, and drag and drop the Login widget to the side bar of your site by mentioning the URLs of registration page, password recovery page etc.

Now your site will contain a login area in the side bar that will allow your visitors to join your forum and thus resulting in your benefits as mentioned above.

Step 8 : You can also change the default settings of bbPress, for it go to
Settings -> Forums, a new page will be displayed showing different default settings of bbPress.

Here you can change them according to your choice like the first option “Disallow editing after” which shows the time period allotted to edit any particular post after publishing can be changed. By default it is 5 minutes as shown below in the image.

You can also change the second option like “Throttle posting every”, this is the setting to control the time period of a new post to be appeared on the forum. By default it is 10 seconds.

and in this way you can change the other settings also as shown below -

At last, I want to make you aware about the
5 Different roles of a users in bbPress, each with different capabilities and power to work on forum.

1. Key Master : The owner of the site, when install bbPress on their site are automatically assigned by this role. In simple words the administrator of the site is the key master of the forum as he/ she can easily create different forums, topics, edit and delete them even. So the overall command over the forum is obviously of key master.

2. Moderator : The moderator is the one who has the power to manage the forum in a better way, new topics to be created and managed etc.

3. Participants : Participants are those people who participate in the forum, and do discussions on the topics, they can even subscribe to any of the post and also make them favorite.

4. Spectators : They are only having permissions to read the discussions, post on the forum. They cannot  do editing, deleting or creating a new post etc, as they have read only permissions. They are those visitors who are not registered to your forum and just want to read the discussions on your site.

5. Blocked : These are the people who are blocked by you to enter into your forums, they can read the public posts and discussions but cannot participate in it.

So that was all about bbPress. Hope you understood it very well and if you are interested then you can implement it easily on your site. For a practical view you can visit the link http://www.inkthemes.com/supportforum/, this is the support forum of our site based on bbPress. Let me know your feedback, queries and suggestions through comments below.

About Neha Yadav
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"I like to post the blogs related to real life and helpful for a successful life. You can gain more knowledge and share your issues with me on our website via comments"

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