Adding a small discussion forum to my Wordpress site?

Hi, I have a wordpress site that happens to be in a particular niche where there are a LOT of questions but most other people who visit the site would know the answers.. in short I was advised to set up a very simple forum/discussion place so that people could display their questions/concerns and other visitors "or myself" could answer and reply underneath.

I put some study into this but I'm not yet sure of the best method, I saw something about phpBB but I don't know would it work, basically I just need - www.mydomain.com/forum or, forum.mydomain.com

Thanks for any advice, really not sure what the best approach would be.

 

Thanks, I'm checking that out now, seems pretty solid.

 

In the past, I have tested a few wordpress plugins that did a reasonable job being a forum. The main benefit of plugins is it blends into your site perfectly. One plugin that might be of interest to you is "dw question and answer"
view: https://wordpress.org/plugins/dw-question-answer/ -> its not a forum, but might be worth your time to have a look at. (just to clarify, I have never tested this plugin, use at your own risk)

Here is a hint though, Before you go to far, (testing on a live website) it might be best to create a subdomain, such as testing.mydomain.com and install a muck around version of wordpress. This way, you are free to experiment without any risk of it interfering with your main site.

If you do want to go for a full forum (a free one), I was very happy with PHPbb, mainly as I was able to find a massive range of themes, as well as alot of document support for it.

Before you do this though, have a thought about the upkeep of the forum. You will need to dedicate some time to maintaining it (removing spam). It is a cost to consider before you start the project.

 

Thanks Matt, excellent reply makes perfect sense - you have given me a lot to think about. I like the idea of testing this out on a subdomain also, experimenting at this scale could cause some issues otherwise. I assume with phpbb you can turn your subdomain into the forum i.e. myforum.mydomain.com.

 

You can add a forum onto a subdomain, but I would go with buddypress. It is very easy to set up and there are lots of other cool social features. Plus it blends in perfectly with your existing site. Here's one I put together a few weeks ago: http://fast-stream.info/careers/forums/

 

You can you BBPress. It should do the job.

 

You can try BBPress. It should do the job. Google it for the homepage link.

 

If you want simplicity, check out the WPMU forum plugin. Works really great on one of my sites.

premium.wpmudev.org/project/forums/