Simplosys Solutions Blog

_{Wordpress bloggers often have the need to integrate a forum or a user discussion area in their websites. This is especially true for blogs for a commercial product (software/book/download), multiple-author blogs} or blogs on topics that lend themselves to discussion among visitors. My blog at http://www.endlesswait.com is about legal immigration issues in the United States. Legal immigrants are a frustrated bunch, usually waiting in line for years (often more than a decade) to complete their immigration process. During this wait time, there are all sorts of information that they need to maintain their legal status and what not. They tend to discuss this with each other.

I am working on adding a forum to this site at http://endlesswait.com/forum. As of today, this forum has nothing in it. Just the plain bbpress install.

The installation process is pretty simple. It is documented well here but there are a couple of points where you could get confused. If you already have a wordpress blog and are adding the bbpress forum to the blog, then Step 2 in the installation sequence takes care of that. I managed to install my forum in about 20 minutes from start to finish. It should have taken even lesser time, if it weren't for some minor errors that got resolved by reading the documentation pretty easily.

I am looking forward to start using bbpress. I think people haven't really started taking it too seriously yet, but my gut says that it could catch on really well because of the huge wordpress base and the fact that it's interface is so refreshing. User interfaces can often make or break a product and bbpress certainly has that part figured out pretty well.

I am going to be working with this over the next few weeks whenever I get a chance. I will update this post with my experiences as I move forward.