Simple:Press: A Fully Scalable Forum Plugin for WordPress

Looking for a solid plugin option for adding forums to your WordPress site? You may not have heard of Simple:Press, since it’s not available in the WordPress plugin repository. bbPress tends to dominate the plugin space for forum plugins, so I wanted to introduce you to another option, just in case you’re looking for something a little different.

Simple:Press has been under development for the past six years, steadily becoming a full-featured WordPress forum plugin that can scale into the thousands.

Simple:Press Features:

Simple:Press boasts all the robust capabilities and features of a standalone forum, seamlessly integrated into WordPress. Here are just a few of the most important features:

• Fully integrated with WordPress user registrations and logins
• Supports WordPress 3.0 standard, Multisite and BuddyPress
• Optional Cookies to track Guests and Members
• Comprehensive Admin Options and Settings
• Underpinned by a powerful user and permission system
• Can create private and/or public forums
• Optional Spam Prevention tool
• Optional post moderation (approval)
• User Signature and Avatars
• Forum Statistics – including who is online
• Admins Unread Post list with Quick Reply
• Subscription and Watched topics
• Image, Media and File Uploader
• User defined Topic Tags
• Fully customizable skins and icons
• Extended Member Profile Options with ability to add custom Profile data items
• Extensive set of Template Tags for showing forum data outside forum pages
• Custom icons for forum/topics
• Custom Smileys and Badges

Simple:Press is completely localized for language support and there’s a growing list of translations available. It’s also created to be SEO friendly with optimized permalinks, page and browser title settings, and custom descriptions and keywords.

Why would you use Simple:Press instead of bbPress?

Many of you might be wondering why you might use the SimplePress plugin instead of bbPress, which seems to be the standard around these parts. Simple:Press has more features built in. While bbPress is widely used and has a large community of people contributing, many of its add-on features are only available through additional plugins at the moment. Simple:Press offers all the features you would expect from forum software in one package.

If you’re the adventurous type, go ahead and give Simple:Press 5.0 Beta a spin. SP V5 requires WordPress 3.3+ and will not work with any other versions. For the latest updates, make sure to subscribe to the Simple:Press blog.

Tags:

• bbPress
• forums