Guide in choosing a forum for your blog.

If you want to extend your blog’s existence and want to build a community out from it, then a forum might be right for you. Before leaping a step towards installing a forum, here are some points you should consider. First, you should be able to extract the recent posts, forum statistics towards your blog, in other words were are talking about SSI (Server Side Includes) Although, some forum software can easily extract the information you want to appear on your site or blog, others will rely on your knowledge on database. If you can’t, then you should consider hiring a database guru instead. Second, you might as well consider the scalability of the forum software wherein you can easily modify your forums package. Third, database integration. I don’t like to come back to a websites that make you sign-up for two accounts. Aside from the hassle it makes, it might be time consuming on your part considering that you have to remember your two accounts. Lastly, you should also consider either paid or free forum softwares. Here are some of the forum softwares, widely used today.

Open source bulletin board software:

• phpBB – is a powerful, multi-functional, and easily modifiable bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple administration, and helpful tutorial. With phpBB you can:

have unlimited forums and posts

use multiple language interface

search within forum posts

post private messages to your forum members

has a plugin to integrate with wordpress blog

• SMF – is free, elegant, feature-rich community forum software. It has a comprehensible and intuitive user interface. SMF has large online community with developers and other users able and willing to help. It has many high-value and high-quality features. SMF offers easy-to-modify theme support and has highly optimized database structure and queries are suitable for small and large forums. Has a plugin to integrate forum database with WordPress blog.

Affiliate Crunch has chosen this forum software.
Paid bulletin board software:

• Vbulletin – scalable and easily modifiable forums package for your web site. vBulletin is suitable for medium and large forum communities. Being paid software, vBulletin ensures much better security of its code and database. vBulletin is written in PHP and uses MySQL backend. Although a sort of costly investment, it has however a lot of add-ons to enhance its functionality. Can integrate well with WordPress blog.

• Invision Power Board – another powerful scaleable bulletin board system. It allows you to easily create, customize and manage your online forum. IPB is written in PHP and needs one MySQL database. It is easily installed, has intuitive administration and tons of features. Has a plugin to interact with WordPress blog.

WordPress forum plugin:

• Simple Forum – As the name suggests, Simple Forum is a simple and straightforward forum that does the sort of stuff a forum is supposed to. It is fully integrated with WordPress and the WP User system and has grown from being simple to being very richly featured because people keep asking for extra and exciting stuff!

Affiliate Crunch . com is using this plugin at the moment.

• bbPress – from the makers of WordPress, this simple bulletin board software can well integrate with wordpress although it is not a plugin for wordpress. This software is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed.

In the long run, forum can be at times hard to maintain. You might experience more downsides in running this software if you have less time on this. But establishing this on your site with high traffic can be rewarding.

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