Creative Online Marketing, Link Building and Ecommerce

There are several options for integrating a discussion forum into your wordpress blog.

bbpress:

Pros: The one to watch out for. Integrates closely with wordpress. Makers of wordpress are closely involved with the development of this software. Actively developed. 

Cons:

1. The stable version does not integrate with wordpress 2.6 or higher. Generally speaking, the stable version seems to lag behind wordpress stable version by at least a few months. So, if you have one of the last 2-3 recent releases of wordpress, bbpress will not work for you if you are interested in cleanly integrating the two.

2. Themes do not integrate easily.

3. Still pretty early software that has not even made it to a 1.0 stable version. Not fot the faint of heart or for production sites that don't have a testbed.

wp-forum:

Pros: Works. It's been around for a while. Looks better than Simple:press, the only other long-standing stable wordpress integration forum plugin.

Cons:  Too few developers. Doesn't work with sites that are hosted on PHP4.x. That's a major limitation for at least 25% of websites out there as of this writing.

Vanilla

Pros: Large user community. Several successful installs. Great, simple user interface.

Cons: Few developers. Seems that the comminity of people using it have several issues getting integration to work well. Many vanilla users are considering the move to bbpress, as can be seen in the bbpress forum.

Simple:Press

Pros: Works. Large user community.

Cons: Look and feel is very ordinary, compared to bbpress or vanilla.

In short, there are no plugins that work well with acceptable drawbacks. It sucks, but after over 10 hours of research and testing, I am actually dropping the idea of adding a forum to my Endlesswait.com site. At least for now.