bbPress Reviews, Downloads & Maintenance

Are you looking for a timeless, elegant, and streamlined discussion board? bbPress is easy to integrate, easy to use, and is built to scale with your growing community.

bbPress is intentionally simple yet infinitely powerful forum software, built by contributors to WordPress.

Installation

From your WordPress dashboard

Visit ‘Plugins > Add New’
Search for ‘bbPress’
Activate bbPress from your Plugins page. (You will be greeted with a Welcome page.)

From WordPress.org

Download bbPress.
Upload the ‘bbpress’ directory to your ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory, using your favorite method (ftp, sftp, scp, etc…)
Activate bbPress from your Plugins page. (You will be greeted with a Welcome page.)

Once Activated

Visit ‘Forums > Add New’ and create some forums. (You can always delete these later.)
If you have pretty permalinks enabled, visit example.com/forums/, or if you do not have pretty permalinks enabled, visit example.com?post_type=forum
Visit ‘Settings > Forums’ and configure the settings to best match the needs of your community.
Visit ‘Tools > Forums > Import Forums’ if you have an existing forum to convert to bbPress.

Once Configured

bbPress comes with a robust theme-compatibility API that does its best to make bbPress look and feel right with just-about any WordPress theme. You may need to adjust some styling on your own to make everything look pristine.
You may want to customize the register/activation/sign-in/lost-password flows, to better suit your site. bbPress comes with a bevy of shortcodes to make this possible, listed here: https://codex.bbpress.org/shortcodes/
bbPress also comes with built-in support for Akismet and BuddyPress, two very popular and very powerful WordPress plugins. If you’re using either, visit your Forum Settings page and ensure that integration appears correct.

Frequently Asked Questions

No FAQ available

Review feed

Salvatore Noschese

9/14/2024

Unusable. looks like abandoned.

Tried to install: keymaster issue (so, cannot work at all). fixed keymaster issue with bbp style plugin (a plugin to fix another plugin looks insane), now blank page. tried to fix also this via bbp plugin, a lot of graphical glitch and shortcode not parsed. atm (from some years now) is really unusable.

Li-An

3/25/2025

so old now

I am active on french support forum who runs under BBPress. It’s looks so old now, without the features (and rendering) the other forum’s programs have now. I now this forum here is under BBPress, but it’s a reworked version of what you get with the plugin.

Screenshots

Forums - Admin Interface
Topics - Admin Interface
Replies - Admin Interface
Settings - Admin Interface
Settings 2 - Admin Interface
Themes - Admin Interface
Single Forum - Default Theme

Changelog

Check out the releases page

Back to plugins