Best Forum Software - Specifically for Integrating and Using with Studiopress/WP

[bustagums]

I truly value this forum and the help I receive from here. I am starting my question here because everyone I have met here has given me top notch advice and support and you are all smarter than me with Wordpress ;-)

So I am about to get a great new big client that is involving an in depth website build. There will be a lot of functionality and moving pieces to the website.

Think this: http://www.snowestonline.com/forum/ just different Niche. So we like a lot of what that site has but I want to build it in wordpress and I am wondering about a forum?

is V Bulletin the recommended Forum for big time users and easy monetization or is there other ones that are better and I just don't know about.

So far from my Research Mingle seems to be the best choice for using with Wordpress and it has a lot of great features we can utilize and it is fully integrated with Wordpress which I really like.

So what would be your recommendation on a Forum to use for this sort of project???

Also do the Wordpress Plugins for SEO purposes and other plugins work with a Forum? I suppose they would if the Forum is integrated into Wordpress such as Mingle is.

I appreciate any advice and help you can lend.

- Kyle

[andrea_r]

Have you looked at bbPress? That's the "official" forum for WordPress.

[bustagums]

Hi Andrea. Thanks for the reply. I did check that out but it seems to lack some of the functionality I am looking for. Mingle has a lot of additional addon features for it. I notice Studiopress uses VBulletin. I am curious to hear other people's experiences with any forum software they have used and what they recommend.

Thanks!

[jp2112]

I use MyBB for a few sites. It is easy to maintain and update, and adding plugins is simple.

[jezza101]

I've got my Genesis / bbpress forum up and running here and am very happy at how it has turned out.

I also run a site with vbulletin but it's complexity is too overwhelming for me. It's a great piece of software but (imo) it doesn't have the best admin interface (about a million light years away from WP!). That site has about 10k members but I think all the key functionality that we all use is wrapped up in bbpress so for my next site I've decided to give it a go.

The real bonus of bbpress is the theme integration, for this site it looks like a single experience and that the forum is part of the blog. My WP / VB site always seemed very separated and although the forum and blog both got a few thousand daily hits there was little interaction between the two, it was almost like two separate sites!

GL with the forum :)

[stormyweather]

I'm using Mingle - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mingle-forum/

It's very simple and easy to use. Just hope the developer can manage to keep up development, somehow.

[violet]

Have you seen SimplePress?
http://simple-press.com/
Lots of features and they've always had great support.

I've seen Mingle as well and I think it looks promising though I haven't used it.