Recently I’ve added a trekking forum on top of my existing trekking blog, to let the readers of my blog interact and communicate and interact with each other better…and you might have guessed, being such a WordPress fanatic, the platform I chose for my forum was bbPress, from the same Automattic team.

I really related to the 2nd paragraph right on the landing page of bbPress:

Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked?

I’ve had experience with managing forums. Twice. And frankly, my experience with forum software is that half the time I don’t even know what I am doing and I have no idea what else I need to put in place before the software was ready for the visitors. There is just too much administration and settings to tweak before you even feel ready.

bbPress is really a lean killing machine, like WordPress, and for WordPress theme tweaking fanatics – I’ve good news. The bbPress themes are just a little more complex, so if you can manage a WordPress theme, you can probably grasp a bbPress theme by playing with it for less than an hour.

Anyway, the best reason for choosing bbPress over the other forums in the open source market like phpBB, or SMF is that is is really lean – downloaded off the bbPress site, its like a simple messaging system with not much additional functionality.

However, with the addition of plugins (which I think some would soon become core bbPress functionality), it can function as well as any other forum, in my opinion.

Two great examples using bbPress are the Technorati Support forums and 9Rules Notes. This only goes to show that bbPress is capable of the heavy duty volume!

Are you considering to start a forum on top of your current site?

Wait? First evaluate if this is really what you want – check out my previous post on Blogs versus Forums and the difference between the two. Are you sure you want to do this? Managing a forum also comes with responsibility.

… and if the green lights are on and you have decided to go ahead – go check out bbPress. Give it a go. You’ll be amazed how much potential there is in this lean forum software!