20 Top bbPress Plugins for building Powerful Forum

Users may not find your bbPress driven forum interactive if you are not installing the plugins. Default bbPress setup is incomplete without the plugins as it just provides the basic functionality. Below is a list of 20 bbPress plugins that you must install in order to make your forum much more robust, powerful, flexible and different from others.

1)       BBsync*- It is the most powerful plugin if you have newly launched your forum. Whenever a new blog post is created, this post will be turned into a new topic in your forums. Replies can be made to the topic. Comments made through the wp comments form will also be shown as replies to the corresponding thread. All comments/replies will show up automatically in WordPress, too.

2)       Simple Google Adsense- Add Google Adsense code in your bbPress forum, in the footer.

3)       bbRatings- This plugin allows users to rate topics on a simple 1-5 star scale.

4)       Subscribe To Topic- Members of the forum can subscribe to get new post notifications via email or simply track topics without emails.

5)       OpenID for bbPress- Give your members the ability to add OpenID to their account instead of using passwords, and new members can register instantly via an OpenID provider.

6)       bbPress Signatures- This plugin allows users to add signatures to their forum posts. It extends their edit profile options automatically.

7)       bbPress Smilies- Adds clickable smilies (emoticons) to bbPress.

8)       Avatar Upload- It allows users to upload an avatar (gif, jpeg/jpg or png) image to bbPress.

9)       User Photo- It allows a user to associate a profile photo with their account

10)   Topic Icons- Adds icons next to your topic (and forum) titles automatically based on keywords or special topic status such as sticky, support question, has poll, etc.

11)   bbSocialize- Allows you to set and display your social media profiles like flickr, Twitter, pownce, facebook, stumbleupon, digg, delicious in your public forum profile.

12)   bb-emoticons- Emoticons is a best way to show real expression. This plugin adds a ‘list’ of smilies to your forum.

13)   BB-Ads- Allows you to place custom ads/messages throughout your forum.

14)   Post Count Plus – Dynamic Titles, Colors & More!- The plugin display the total post count for each user next to their posts, There are many other customization options for colors and format are available.

15)   Human Test for bbPress- This plugin stops the automatic registration by bots. The plugin adds a new field at the bottom of the registration page with two random numbers to add together.

16)   bbPress Sitemap- This Plugin automatically generate a Google Sitemap to your bbPress powered forum.

17)   AutoMeta- The plugin automatically generates meta keywords and tags for Technorati.

18)   bbPress Polls- You can allow polls to be added to any topic in bbPress. You can optionally try pollsdaddy for bbPress forum.

19)   bbPress Attachments- Allows members to upload attachments on their posts. The attachments should not contain any objectionable content and must not be against Google Terms of Service. You can set your own Terms of service using the plugin below.

20)   Terms of Service- Adds a “Terms of Service” (aka TOS) agreement to your registration page (and can optionally be linked to directly).

How to install bbPress Plugin-

• Download the bbPress plugins to your desktop and unzip it. Now upload the plugins to your server in your bbPress-Plugin directory of your ‘forum’ folder using any FTP client. You may use cute FTP, FileZilla or any other FTP software. Make sure the transfer mode is set to automatic. Do not FTP in ‘ASCII’ mode; else the existing template or theme images present inside the folder will not be visible to your forum.
• Login to the forum http://www.yoursite/forum as a Keymaster.
• Click Admin and then select the Plugin tab. Activate the plugin.  

Note*- Except bbSync all the bbPress Plugins listed below will be installed in bbPress-Plugins folder. bbSync will be installed in the same way as you install other wordpress plugin.

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Tagged as: bbpress, Blog Widgets, Wordpress