My website has traditionally been a bulletin-board style forum, and I’m reimplementing it in WordPress with BuddyPress.

The typical next step would be to recreate the forums using bbPress, however when I look at bbPress, and forums like the one I’m posting in right now, it reminds me of… the past. UBB, vBulletin, all that stuff…

I want something different now, something I would consider more modern. Looking at what goes on, out there, on the Internet – there are two sites in particular that I feel encourage a lot of participation; Facebook and YouTube.

So it strikes me that what I would really like to do is just re-use WordPress’ blog post (and comments) functionality to create the ‘forum’. Then it wouldn’t look like a forum, but I could start reintroducing some of the forumy concepts.

Does anyone have any thoughts on that, or is using their BuddyPress site like that already?

There are some hurdles to this visually and regarding the workflow of reading/writing in WordPress, particularly regarding a lack of ajax, but I’m slowly finding plugins to improve this and perhaps I’ll have to write some of my own to fill in the gaps.

Another issue I can think of right off the bat is post ordering. I’m not aware of any simple way to, for example, bump certain posts up – such as based on activity (which is what happens on forums). But I guess I can work on that.

There is also the user role concern. To create posts registered users have to all be Authors. I haven’t found any issues with that so far, but if anyone can think of any I would appreciate the feedback.

I had a crack at using bbPress with a view to restyle it to look more like posts/comments, and perhaps that’s the approach I should be using. Now I’m not sure.

[@henrywright Moderator 8 years, 9 months ago]

The alternative to having WordPress posts as “topics” and WordPress comments as “topic replies” is to theme bbPress. Check out the Theme Compat article for some introductory info. You can either use an already-made theme, or have a go at developing something unique yourself.

[@brx8r Participant 8 years, 9 months ago]

Yeah I’m gonna stick it out with bbPress, I think there’s a lot of work ahead of me but there’s no need to do everything up front.