These days bloggers are using forums in their blog so that their readers can enjoy healthy discussions and share their problems. Even India’s top blogger Amit Agarwal also have forum in his blog. So I have also decided to integrate one forum script with my wordpress powered blog. Amit uses bbPress for running forums on labnol. bbPress is completely free, open source forum software packet written in the PHP programming language and available under the GNU General Public License. The project was created by Matt Mullenweg (the founder developer of wordpress) to support users of WordPress. Actually existing forum softwares like vBulletin, phpBB, SMF etc are too heavy, highly complex and overly sophisticated for the requirements of wordpress bloggers, so bbPress was created with the same focus as WordPress’s forums. So, dear friends I have integrated bbPress with abhisays and you can access it through http://abhisays.com/forums.

Why I Choose bbPress ?

bbPress is based on latest internet standards, very easy of use, easy to integrate with WordPress, good browsing speed, reliable and hack proof. I can always have nice features on the forum through the extensive plugin system of bbPress.

How to install bbPress ?

• Download bbPress.
• Uncompress all the files and upload them to your server
• Visit the URL of the bbPress site this will be yoursitename/bbPress(the name of the directory where you have uploaded all the bbPress files)
• You will have the bbPress installer on first visit to the URL mentioned in above step.
• Simply follow the instructions in the installer
• Now you can visit “Settings” in the admin area to customize your forum.
• If you have any questions, then ask me or visit my forums and post your question there.

How to do SEO for your bbPress forums ?

Create a file called .htaccess in bbPress’ root directory. Put this line. “Options +MultiViews” in that file without quotes and then go to the “General” settings in the admin area and choose a permalink type.

How to change the default theme ?

No one likes the default theme. Installing themes in bbPress is very easy. For this You have a directory called my-templates/ in bbPress’ root directory. Just upload the theme to your server as a new subdirectory in your my-templates/ directory. Go to the admin area and presentation and enable that theme there.

I will post more information on this bbPress forum software. Till then enjoy reading my blog and also don’t forget to register on my forum.