As feedback on WPBeginner grew, we tried different solutions such as Livefyre to improve discussions on our site. Many WordPress users want to make comments on their website more social. This is why people try Facebook comments, Disqus comments, and now even Google+ comments. We recently found a plugin that allows you to add forums to replace comments in WordPress. We liked the idea and decided to try it. In this article, we will show you how to add bbPress forum to WordPress posts as comments.
Forums are a great way to build online communities. For many WordPress websites, the community building features of an online forum cannot be replaced by the WordPress comment system. Similarly, a forum software cannot be a replacement for WordPress. However, the combination of both can result in a killer combination of lively discussions, community building, increased user engagement, and more user loyalty for your website.
Users can participate in the forum by leaving replies to their posts or creating topics in other discussion areas. The conversations that originate from your articles can ignite multiple topics in your forum. Most importantly, when people participate in an online forum, they are more likely to share it in their social circles.
We understand that not all WordPress websites have the audience or the desire to build communities. There is so much content on the web that it does not receive any comments despite receiving significant traffic. However, if you're running a website that generates a lot of comments, discussions, debates, and heated arguments among your passionate readers, you can benefit from the interactive features of an online forum built into your articles.
The first thing you need to do is add the bbPress forums to WordPress. We have a step-by-step guide to setting up a WordPress forum with bbPress. Once you have installed and configured the bbPress forum. Make sure you have created at least one forum. You can give this forum any name, for example:Website Discussions, Post Discussions, or anything you like.
The next thing you need to do is install and activate the bbPress Topics for Posts plugin. After activating the plugin go to Settings »Discussion and scroll down to bbPress Themes for Post Defaults section.
The first option for setting up bbPress themes for posts is to choose a forum where your WordPress posts will be themed. You can choose a forum that you created earlier, or you can choose a different forum for each post manually when writing your article. If you choose a default forum, you can apply these settings to all of your existing posts by clicking the Apply Settings to Existing Posts button. This will create topics for all your existing posts in the forum you have selected.
You can choose whether to copy your post tags for forum topics and choose how many replies to show below each post. If you want, you can display the entire topic below the post or even display the link to the forum topic so users can discuss the post in your forum. We recommend displaying a reasonable number of replies like 10 for each post.
Now, if you chose a default forum to create topics for posts, the plugin will automatically create a topic for a post you publish. It will also display the latest replies to that topic with a topic reply form at the bottom of your posts.
If you didn't choose a default forum on the discussion settings page, you can still create a topic for each post manually from the post editing area. On the post edit screen, click the Screen Options dropdown in the upper right corner and check the discussion box. Scroll to the bottom of the post editing area and you'll see a discussion box that allows you to enable or disable comments and trackbacks for individual posts. There will be a new option to create a forum topic for this post.
If you are using the bbPress forums as a replacement for comments, you may want to disable comments on your site. To do that go to Settings »Discussion and uncheck the box that says Allow people to post comments on new articles. . This will disable the comment form from appearing on new articles you add. However, people can still post comments on past articles. To disable comments on all articles, you can run this SQL query using phpMyAdmin.
Note: You should always back up your database before making any direct changes to it.
ACTUALIZAR 'wp_posts' SET comment_status = 'closed';
This query updates the posts table in your database and sets comments to be closed on all posts. Note that if you are not using the default wp_ prefix for your database, then your posts table may have a different prefix, so you'll need to rename the posts table.
What do you think about the idea of using bbPress forums to replace WordPress comments? For questions and comments, you can contact us on Twitter or leave a comment below.
