bbPress

What is bbPress?

Last modified: February 23, 2020

Cloudways

bbPress is a free, open source software that creates a forum area on your WordPress website. It is installed as a plugin on your WordPress powered website and acts just like a traditional forum. However, unlike its predecessors, its use of resources is much more effective and therefore, it won’t slow down your website.

The software is very versatile and can be used for numerous profitable community based ventures. You can create multisite forums, use customizable templates and there is a great support for preventing spam, which can ruin the reputation of a forum.

bbPress has its origins in an older forum software package known as miniBB. However, this used too much coding and was far too ‘bloated’ to be used on the WordPress programming structure and be effective. Therefore, the development team behind WordPress created the code for a new forum software package from scratch (bbPress).

At first, it was only available on WordPress.org. However, it has since been turned into a plugin and is available, for free, for all websites built with WordPress.

The simplicity of the plugin to create a forum on a WordPress website has made this an attractive option for those looking to create a community on their website. And because the developers behind the plugin are the same ones as WordPress, there are no compatibility issues recorded as yet. In fact, there are unlikely to be any for any lengthy time, the developers constantly test their core coding and plugins to prevent compatibility issues.

bbPress is lightweight, therefore a website that is using this for a community area won’t be slowed down. Research has shown that when you have a one second delay in your load times, you can lose 7% of your audience. For a community site, losing a small part of the audience can compromise on the efforts of the website owners.

Another advantage of using bbPress is that it is very easy to extend functionality. Therefore, website owners can create an immersive and unique experience for users that match their desired brand ideas. And if something should go wrong, there is an active group of developers and supporters willing to help.

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