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
December 15, 2022
Very primitive. No documentation. For example, there is a search box but no way to put a label on it. I tried to add a topic to a forum but there was no submit button. Basically, it has not been updated in a year and it shows.
June 27, 2022
1 reply
I'm shocked how unusable this is. Configuration is not simple and not documented. Appearance is primitive at best, not even basic. But in the end it's totally worthless as all the basic access functionality is missing or does not work. No registration page/ link on login page. No documentation on setting this up. blogs all point to manually making a registration page using shortcodes?? But the codes don't work, so the plugin is just useless. From here I tried Asgaros and while simple, it actually works in full out of the box with easy configuration all in one place (not 3 like bbpress). Sure if you want a nice registration form you need another plugin, but that was already the case for Wordpress anyway.
February 22, 2022
Works great
simple and fast
and easy to get a nice design with free pluggin bbp style pack
August 24, 2021
1 reply
We wanted to try BBPress but we discovered quickly that it caused way too many problems with roles & permissions for the site. So we removed it. But it turns out that for at least 8 years bbPress has known the roles can't be removed cleanly and they just shrug and say "not important." So, I recommend you NOT INSTALL THIS PLUGIN. It will leave ugly traces behind itself like a nasty WordPress slug and you'll waste hours googling it and trying to fix it to no avail. It's old, it's ugly, and it's a mess.
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.
Contributors & Developers
“bbPress” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“bbPress” has been translated into 54 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