If you are looking for a forum software for your wordpress blog, with less manual coding to make it fit with the theme, then mingle forum is all yours. Its a complete open source plugin that you can install it via WordPress Dashboard -> Plugins tab in a minute. Its a modified light weight, solid, secure, easy to use social networking plugin for your wordpress blog. We do have wordpress official forum plugin BBPress and social networking plugin BuddyPress from Automatic. Still, mingle stands out from them with its simple theme integration. In BBPress we need to customize it manually to integrate it with the wordpress theme.
That part is sorted out here to make the forum installation easy and ready to setup your categories and forum topics. As said, you can use mingle plugin to transform your wordpress blog as social networking site. Lets have a look at the requirements and features of mingle.
REQUIREMENTS
- PHP 4
- WordPress 2.7 or newer
FEATURES
- NEW! Integrates with the Mingle Plugin (by Blair Williams) NOTE: The “Mingle” plugin is NOT required for forum to work
- Avatars
- Profile’s (Works with/without Pretty Profile URLs enabled in Mingle settings)
- Activity in the forum shows up as activity in mingle (Helps increase discussion in both your forums and your SN)
- Deleted forum topics will also delete the corresponding Mingle board post
- NEW! Media embedding into forum posts (like Youtube, Flickr, Photobucket.)
- WordPress 3.0 ready!
- Categories with sub-forums
- User Groups
- NEW! User Levels (EX: Newbie, Beginner, Pro.)
- NEW! Private Messages (I would recommend turning this feature off and using my new Cartpauj PM Plugin instead as it is MUCH better!)
- Moderators
- NEW! Skins
- Captcha
- BB Code
- Smilies
- Custom Forum Search (Some users are having issues with the search function)
- Guest posts
- NEW! Hot/Very Hot topics
- NEW! Sticky (Pinned) Topics
- NEW! Move, Edit, Remove and Close topics
- Email notifications on replies to topics
- Recent posts widget (or PHP shortcode for your theme)
- Integrates nicely with most themes (It’s tough to make it work for all themes so some skin modifications may be required for your site)
- Allow/Dis-allow other users to view your profile from the Forum
- NEW! Supports different languages
STEPS TO INSTALL
You may use the setup guide provided if you are new to wordpress and plugin installation. Mingle can be installed simply by visiting your Plugin -> Add New section in your Dashboard. Next step,
- Create a new page for your forum to display on
- Head to the page you just created for the forum, paste [mingleforum] and save, (NOTE: It’s best to paste that under the HTML tab of your page editor)
- Head to Dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New -> Upload
- Browse to the .zip file you downloaded and click open
- Click Install
- Click Activate
- You’ll now see a new admin menu called Mingle Forum
- Configure your Mingle Forum options, Set a Skin, create your Categories and Forums
That is all it takes and visit your site to see the settings in effect.
nice.. will be it effective if we use it in blogs ?
For usual blogging it wont fit siva. It would be great for community based site that allows many authors to write.
Have any plan to go for another site ?? 🙂
Great plugin Robin. I have many clients that have asked about a forum but I did not want to go through the hassle of integrating other forum software with wordpress logins. This should make it much easier.
I am Glad that you like Aaron 🙂 do let me know the feedback after using this system.
– Robin
Hi, I have installed the forum but when people try and register is says user registration is currently not allowed – help? Also how do people make new posts?
Thanks
Do all the users have to sign in with the ugly WordPress dashboard sign in page?