bbPress Plugins That Work!

After going thru many bbPress plugins here are some that work with bbPress 0.9.2 and provide added functionality to your forum.

1. bbPress Latest Discussion
   This is actually a Wordpress plugin which displays up to the last 10 discussions going on at the forum. Let your blog visitors know what is going on at your forum.
2. bbPress Signatures
   Let registered users add a signature to their posts. You can also add the option to individially toggle this option on or off per post.
3. bbRatings
   Add the option of post ratings. Let registered users voice vote on the posdt on a star rating of 1 to 5.

4. Censor
   Want to filter posts for bad words? This is the plugin. There is just one issue at the moment … its settings page doesn’t show up in the bbPress admin. A slight tweak will do the trick.

   Open censor.php and find the function: function censor_add_admin_page

   Replace the entire function with this:

   function censor_add_admin_page() { bb_admin_add_submenu(__('Censor Posts'), 'use_keys', 'censor_admin_page'); }

   You will also want the titles to be filtered so this code needs to be added, too:

   add_filter( 'topic_title', 'censor_post_text' );

   You can add the above after the 3rd line of code:

   add_filter('post_text', 'censor_post_text');

   You can see a listing of all these fixes at the plugin page as well.

5. Post Notification
   Currently you can add a post to your favorites list and subscribe to its RSS feed. However, some members may want their ntifications via email. This plugin adds an option to their Edit Profile page which if turned on, emails them everytime there is a new post in the favorite threads.
6. Private Forums OR Hidden Forums
   These are the two main plugins available if you want to have private forums. The first option offers four access levels: Open to all * Registered Users * Moderator * Administrator . The problem with this being that you cannot divide your registered users into groups and allow them to view different forums.

   Hidden Forums is a better alternative in that regard. However, since its read me file claims that it is still not ready for a live website, I’m staying away from it until it is.

7. Quote
   This should actually be a basic functionality. Let your posters quote previous messages. It places blockquote tags around the quotd paras. You can add a style in your css file for this to ensure that the quoted text appears nicely.
8. Report Post
   Let your members report bad posts to you for removal. Don’t be alarmed if you don’t see the Report Post link even after you have added it to your theme. If you are logged in as the poster, you will not see the link. It is assumed that you wouldn’t want to report your own post.
9. Show Top Posters
   Shows a list of your top posters. Again it does not have an admin and if you want to tweak any settings, they need to be done in top-posters.php file.
10. Terms of Service
    Lets you add a terms of service option to the registration form. Get your subscribers to agree to your terms when signing up. The only thing I don’t like about the plugin is it adds the terms right on that page. This can make a page way too long. A link to the terms would have been a much better option. Another hack called for.

    Edit: The Terms of Service does not make the page longer. It takes up around 8 lines worth of space with a scrolling option. All in all it looks good. So no need to have a link to another page.

11. Private Messages
    Add a private messaging system for your members. Just one little warning - The Send New PM option takes you to a page where you get the entire drop down list of members. If you don’t want to expose all your member IDs and allow spamming, then it is a good idea to remove this option.

    Replacing the dropdown with an input box is not without its problems. The script does not check if the member exists as it was relying on a drop down before. So it will show a dummy sent message to any xyz id you add.

    Another option is to just remove the Send New PM option altogether. Add a PM This User option next to each post. This way only members that are active and posting can be PM’d which is how it should be anyway.

The one thing I just couldn’t get to work were the Unread Posts, Unread Topics, Since Last Visited and other similar plugins which display updates since your last login. The reason being they all rely on a plugin called Simple Onlinelist. And this does not work with the latest bbPress version for now.

All in all these plugins require more configuration than most of the Wordpress plugins. Reason being, there is no widgets option so code has to be added to your theme to enable most of these. Plus some of them still do not have a settings option in the admin and whatever setting needs to be done has to be within the php file. Also some like the private messaging are adding entire sections to the forum and hence are going to require some work.

But the great thing is you can choose the functionality you want to add. This makes the script much faster as oppposed to all the functionality being built in by default whether you need it or not.

Tags: All Things bbPress, bbPress Plugins, Forum