There are many options for expanding your blog like including the WordPress forum plugin. A feature like this enhances your blog and increases usability for your web visitors. There are many types of the WordPress forum plugin that you can choose from for your blog.
Why should you have a WordPress forum plugin on your blog?
If you are looking for fun and new functional features to add to your WordPress blog, you should consider adding a WordPress forum plugin. There are a variety of these plugins to choose from including plenty of open source forum systems that are available. Choosing the best WordPress forum plugin is important, but sometimes with so many options to choose from, it can be difficult to find the one that is best for your blogging needs and one that actually works without tons of kinks and bugs that still need worked out.
WordPress Forum Plugin options:
Because WordPress has evolved so much in recent years, it is really now more of an entire Content Management System (CMS), which means WordPress capitalizes on being a great way to enhance and build communication relations between its members. If you are a blogger that is interested in joining this band wagon, it is a good idea to add a WordPress forum plugin to feature on your blog. A forum is a great way to better manage the multiple amounts of conversations that may exisit within a community that a blog simply cannot address without it getting extremely bogged down and confusing among members and frequent visitors.
When choosing the best WordPress forum plugin for your WordPress blog, it is a good idea to choose one that has received great user rating vouching for its reliability and authenticity. Next, it is a good idea to make sure and choose a forum plugin that is simple to install and configure. Many plugins will configure itself automatically wtihin your WordPress theme and styles itself accordingly. Another aspect of forum plugins to take into consideration is to find a plugin that also works well with social networking integration. Just about anyone that is interested in joining your forum on your blog is also most likely to be interested in social networking on online communication. This type of plugin allows users to publish the topics they wish to discuss to their Facebook and Twitter feeds as well. This way, the forum can be embedded into multiple websites and not just your WordPress blog. One of the most popular WordPress forum plugins is the WP-Forum. This plguin supports different skins and blog administrators also have the option to easily turn guest posting on or off with optional Captcha. Because this plugin has such a tight integration with WordPress, it makes it easy for the administrator to use and administer.
Another thing to consider when chosing the best WordPress forum plugin features is to make sure the plugin has been updated recently to adapt for the newest security updates. This is important to keep in mind whenever you are adding a widget or plugin to your blog. Widgets and plugins are often the weakest links open to hackers and other online threats to your blogging account with WordPress. Simply make sure they have been updated recently to add in those newest security patches to make sure they are not at risk.
There are also situationss where it may be best to install your own forum plugin using an open source application, separate from your blog entirely. When it comes to this phpBB is the most popular and reliable of the open source applications. This forum plugin allows you to include in your blog a list of recent theads, topics, conversations, etc providing you with a great way to integrate a forum with your blog.
Make sure you choose a forum plugin that is simple and easy to use because that makes a large difference for your blog visitors. If you want to have frequent visitors to your blog and forum, then it is a must to choose a forum that is usable for everyone, and continues bringing back visitors for more information on your blog and forum.