Users find your bbPress driven forum not interactive and full-featured enough? The reason is that by default bbPress setup is incomplete without the plugins as it provides just the basic functionality. Keep reading the post and discover 10 must-have plugins to make your bbPress forum run successfully.

These days, with the increased popularity of social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+), forums still continue to be the backbone of online interactivity. bbPress, as its name portrays it, is an independent forum package from WordPress developers. However, being a perfectly good example of forum software, bbPress (like WordPress itself) is just the barebones. Despite all the benefits associated with bbPress, it doesn’t comprise everything you need to make your forum feature-rich and highly-interactive. You need to insert in functionality and therefore enable it to do approximately anything you can imagine. Luckily there is a whole set of plugins that aim to bring bbPress to par.

1. bbPress Moderation

By changing the status of new topics and replies to “pending”, the plugin enables to prevent spammers and ensure that your forum stays on topic. Any pending topics or replies are shown as ”Awaiting Moderation” until the administrator approves publishing them.

2. GD bbPress Tools

The GD bbPress Tools plugin is like a few different plugins rolled into one.  It allows to add different expansions and tools to the bbPress powered forum. Currently included features are:

  • BBCode shortcodes support
  • Quote Reply or Topic
  • Additional custom views
  • Basic topics search results view
  • Toolbar menu integration
  • Limit bbPress admin side access

3. bbPress Search Widget

An active forum demands decent search capabilities. This plugin extends the WordPress built-in search capabilities by providing 13 awesome options to help forum users to easily change the search fields, placeholder and button texts.

4. GD bbPress Attachments

One more essential feature of modern forums is the ability to upload attachments (usually photos) so that other forum members can view them. The plugin comes with a number of controls, letting you restrict how large the files can be and also the number of files that are attached to every topic.

5. bbPress Threaded Replies

This plugin works based on the comments display functions that usually come loaded with WordPress and supports built-in topic-display functions of the bbPress. It helps forum members to see who is replying to whom, much like the comments section on a blog posts.

6. bbPress Signature

Signature is one of the most common things found in a forum post and is a short piece of text at the bottom of a post. The plugin provides bbPress forum users with a possibility to customize their signatures according to their needs. Besides, it enables signatures to be applied to all posts and replies.

7. Ultimate WP Filter

The plugin enables you to filter words that you consider to be inappropriate for your audience. It censors explicit words in comments, posts content, posts title, tags, tag clouds and in bbPress automatically replacing them with asterisks.

8. bbPress Quotes

The plugin makes it possible for forum users to quote bbPress forum topics and replies. Once activated, a quote button is placed at the end of replies so that users can easily quote each other. Clicking it sends the content of the reply into the comment area, wrapped in blockquote tags.

9. Rating-Widget: Star-Rating System

The plugin allows users to give star ratings for forum topics, posts, pages, comments. The plugin comes packed with lots of different styles for the ratings; besides, you can also customize them.

10. Private Replies

The Private Replies plugin gives forum users opportunity to reply privately to any post in the activity feed. The message is able to be seen only by the person that posted and the recipient.

Hopefully, the plugins listed above will provide your bbPress forum with the expected functionality and therefore make it much more robust, powerful, flexible and different from all the others.

To cut a long story short, the list does not meant to be exhaustive. In case you have any other useful bbPress plugins, that haven’t been mentioned above, let us know in the comments.

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