Attention Wordpress Site Owners: What's The Best Forum Software to Blend in With WP?

Hello all,

I'm looking into launching a forum for my site that is similar to this one in look, but I wanto blend it in with my wordpress installation to give it the same look and feel of my site.

I'm also looking for a solution that will allow my users to have the same username and password for the forum as with my site using wordpress.

I've tried using bbpress, but had a horrible experience with that because of their support being limited and no real examples out there for me to work from.

I was wondering if some of you wordpress users out there can point me in the right direction and maybe even show me some examples of your own work where you created a forum that blended in with Wordpress as well.

Thanks

 

Sorry I cannot share the username and password but I embed a phpbb forum newest topics into wordpress:

http://www.onlinecasinoreview.bz/
forum: http://www.onlinecasinoreview.bz/forums/

Wordpress plugin: WP-Phpbb Last Topics

 

That would be either vBulletin or SMF forums. phpbb is good too, but there are more plugins for the others. SMF is the best since its free and it has a lot of plugins in the Wordpress Plugin Site. You can integrate your user database,etc. into WordPress. vBulletin can do the same thing using some plugins from both Wordpress Plugins and vbulletin mods. It's a little bit more complex but you can get the job done.

Need any help to integrate it? I'll explain it step by step if you want.

 

Thanks for your example, but I'm really looking into a forum software where registers on my blog would not have to re-register to post on forum. I have quite a few folks register to leave comments on posts and I don't want them to have to do that all over again.

 

I really do like Vbulletin. Do you have any examples of sites that you have integrated with vBulletin and are usernames/passwords the same for the forum and the blog?

 

What's WP-PHPBB like. Anyone have any extended experience?

 

i have used vb myself.
http://game-script.net
Click forum at the top.

However I dont have my integrated with shared login. I just did a custom layout to work cross them both at this time.

I would stay away from the open source ones like phpbb, and like.
tend to get a lot of spammers over time and hard to keep them out.

 

I personally don't have one myself, but many sites like Animedreaming (dot) tv, seems to have done so... Check it out if you want.

 

I personally recommend Vbulletin or IPmar. Both are them are real good forum softwares.

 

i would use bbpress as its made by the same guys that make wordpress (http://bbpress.org/)
not sure how much it has advanced since i last used it but there are quite a few plugins etc available

 

I'll check out BB Press!

 

BBPress is actually used by me, and I'm very satisfied.

 

Has anyone else used SMF that DeadMad7 talked about? I would like to try a free forum software, but I want to make sure it works well first.

 

SMF was ok when i last gave it a whirl, however if you want to go for a stand-alone forum i would go for either vbulletin (not free) or mybb (free), if its to work alongside wordpress i once again recommend bbpress