bbPress Alternative: Move to a Modern WordPress Forum

Looking for a bbPress alternative that keeps your forum inside WordPress? This video shows what a modern WordPress forum adds, accepted answers, voting, an ideas roadmap, trust levels and search inside replies, and how to move to one without losing your posts.

Transcript

Looking for a bbPress alternative? You probably like that your forum lives inside WordPress, and you want it to do more. So keep what works. The forum stays inside WordPress. The members and the data stay yours. And it stays on your own domain. Here is what communities ask of a forum today. Answers that can be accepted. Voting. An ideas board with a roadmap. Members who earn trust over time. Search inside every reply. And pages that update without reloading. Here is a forum that does those things, as a plugin on a WordPress site. A question, with its accepted answer underneath. An ideas board, where members vote and each idea carries a status. And a forum home, with a space for every subject, in the colours of your theme. Moving does not mean starting over. First, back up your database. Then run the built-in bbPress importer. It brings across your forums, topics and replies, with their images and attached files. Check the result. Open a few busy topics and compare them with the originals. Then run the import once more before you switch. Only new posts come over, and nothing is duplicated. Three things make it safe. The importer only reads your old forum. It never changes it. Members are matched to their existing WordPress accounts, so nobody has to sign up again. And if a large import stops halfway, it resumes without repeating what it already brought over. Plan for three things, so there are no surprises. Tags are not imported. Moderators need their roles set again. And the new forum uses its own addresses, so old links need redirects, which you set up yourself. After the import, each old forum is a space here, in your WordPress dashboard. This is where your moderators get their roles back. And one queue collects everything your members report. Your moderators get help too. New members start with limits. Trust is earned by taking part, and the forum promotes people on its own. And spam protection is built in. For members, the change shows in small things. Replies carry votes, and the best one is marked as the answer, and search looks inside every topic and reply, including the ones you imported. So you do not have to choose between a modern forum and your history. Start empty, and years of answers are left behind. Import, and they come along. Members do not sign up again. Their accounts are matched. The forum is full on day one. And you can import again, with no duplicates. Every month you wait, there are more topics to move, and more members used to the old way. The move is smallest today. Jetonomy is the free forum plugin for WordPress. Back up your site, and try the import this week. Get Jetonomy. The link is below.