Forum For Your Blog That Works

July 28th, 2009

Euvy

As you may know EntreSpot has its own Forum , Forums are great tools as it allows better traffic to your site and also helps others greatly. This is necessary if you want your site to be successful and make it sticky so people would come back again .

Now there are many different tools and plug-ins you can use to include a forum on your blog. You can go for the pay option and pay hundreds of dollars, which is good and allows you to access full help and updates and a lot more OR you could search for free forum plug-ins and waste your time trying to configure these things that don’t work and when you get stuck , there is no-one to help.

The solution to all your problems is Simple Press Forum and best of all it is 100% free

Why?

It fully integrates into your WP based site and has its own customizing toolbox.
It comes with a number of skins and sets of icons
You can run private or specialist forums with invited members but is equally able to accommodate open, public forums that allow guest posting.
Link blog posts with forum topics
SEO friendly permalinks
Private Messaging system
Built in Search tool
Optional Spam Prevention tools
Optional and various RSS feeds and email subscription to topics
And so much more

Why would you pay hundreds of dollars using tools when you can have the same functionality with Simple Press Forums.

I highly recommend this

I even got a few words from the owners of the site.

Why was Simple press forum created and how is it supported if its free?

[ANDY] I originally started my blog back in 2005 largely because I wanted to learn php and css and WordPress seemed like a perfect vehicle. Over the next couple of years I wrote several plug-ins but found supporting them through comments or email prone to problems. So I started to look around for a forum plug-in. I looked at other plug-ins but some were no longer supported and none really did what I was wanting so I decided to write my own and version 1 of Simple: Press was born – very simple – very basic. And quite quickly people started to ask me where I got it from so I started to offer it with my other items and it took off from there.

Steve, a.k.a Mr Papa, was my third user and was very enthusiastic and started to help out with support and a bit of coding here and there and eventually we pooled our resources and joined forces to start to make SPF the best forum plug-in for WP that we could.

As to support – we write the code because we enjoy it and both Steve and I believe that supporting it is our responsibility. I am often still up at 2 in the morning working the support forum on one side and coding up a new feature in between!

What can people using SPF expect in the near future?

[ANDY] Version 4.1 due out in beta imminently has had an enormous amount of work done in optimizing code and queries to make it smaller and faster and is also really our ‘feature request’ version. Virtually every new feature stems from users coming onto the forums asking for additions many of which we couldn’t resist doing. Everything from sub-forums to spoilers, to new image and media upload capabilities and members ‘badges’. It’s a big list and a big release. 4.2 will be smaller with the emphasis on improving some of the features we already have with a big focus on Blog Post/Topic Linking and Private Messaging. And maybe a few smaller surprises along the way. After that we plan to take a hard long look at the architecture to see how we can improve things. It also depends on what the WordPress team do as we always need to respond to changes they make.

Will it always be free for anyone to use?

[ANDY] We have no plans to change that arrangement in the foreseeable future. It looks like 2009 will be the first year that donations will pay for the hosting costs which is heartwarming and satisfying. Maybe we may be able to cover some of the past costs as well! But no plans to charge for use.

Get it at Simple Press Forum now.