Are you someone who enjoys crawling and participating on forums?   Based upon feedback from our readers, many of you are.   To tell you the truth, if it is a topic I am passionate about (like WordPress), I am too!

With that said, it is my pleasure to announce that the WordPress Forums are now live.  WPForums.com was built to be an unofficial WordPress forum and to support the WordPress community in a variety of ways.   There is a little of everything!

As of launch, here are the forums we already have available:

• WordPress Discussions – Here we have forums setup to discuss WordPress News, beta releases and release candidates.
• WordPress Support – I often get support questions on old posts in our archives and find it difficult to keep up.   Now people can post their questions in the appropriate forum here and solicit input from the WordPress community!   When you ask a question, the post is moved to the top, making it easier and much quicker to get feedback from other WPForums.com users!   Current forums include getting setup on WordPress, troubleshooting WordPress, WordPress hacks and tutorials, and a discussion of other WordPress resources.
• WordPress Themes – Here we’ve got a separate forum for sharing and discussing free WordPress themes, premium WordPress themes, and we even have a forum dedicated to showcasing your WordPress theme.  I can see these forums being a good way for theme authors to get more exposure for their theme releases as well.
• WordPress Plugins – Like the themes, we wanted a place where people can discuss both free and premium WordPress plugins.   You can promote your plugin or publish a review of an existing plugin.
• WordPress Employment – Whether you are looking to hire someone for some WordPress-related work (coding/design) or you are looking for work, we’ve got you both covered.   The WordPress Employment section is designed to bring buyers together with sellers.  One forum allows freelancers to post their resumes.   The other forum is a great place for people to post what they need and get connected to someone that can do help.

Going forward, we are open to adding additional forums which may be in demand, so let me know if you’d like to see something added.   I also have plans to upgrade the design at some point soon, so keep an eye out for that.

Any questions or comments?  Leave those below.   Otherwise, go check out WordPress Forums already! 

Update: One reader has mentioned problems registering.  If you are having problems, please post the details below and I’ll get it looked into right away.  With that said, I just attempted to register and it worked fine so I don’t anticipate any problems.

Today is Halloween here in the United States, so I figured to celebrate the holiday, I would switch from the usual content post and instead solicit input from the WordPress Hacks readership.   I enjoy doing this from time to time to see what kind of discussion we can get going and the comment often end up offering a wealth of knowledge. 

The question for today is for our readers who either run their own forums or enjoy visiting and commenting on forums.   Which forum software do you prefer?  Do you prefer PHPBB forums or VBulletin forums?  

I’ve always loved forums because an active forum allows you to interact with a large number of people and get help quicker than commenting on a post or even doing a Google search (sometimes).  I actually have experience being an administrator and a user of both forum types.    Here is my experience with both types:

PHPBB Forums

PHPBB Pros

• FREE. 
• Easy to setup.
• Easy for just about anyone to use. 

PHPBB Cons

• Options are limited.
• Not very SEO friendly (as of version 3.0).

VBulletin Forums

VBulletin Pros

• Generally better looking.
• More features. 
• Plugins/Addons available.
• More SEO friendly than PHPBB

VBulletin Cons

• Costs $100-$180.00 per license. 
• Constant Maintenance/Updates required.
• Targeted by Spammers.

Both forum types have skins available for free and for sale, so I didn’t mention that above.  It is also important to mention that you can easily convert your PHPBB forum into a VBulletin forum (I’ve read this, haven’t personally tried it).

In summary, as a user, I’ve always felt that to be considered a serious forum, you need to be using VBulletin.  It just looks more professional, has more options, etc.   From an administrator’s standpoint, however, I’ve enjoyed running PHPBB forums more.   VBulletin forums seem to attract a ton of spammy posts and sometimes moderating posts and banning users can be overwhelming (in my experience) and I feel like I have to update the software every few weeks.  It also seems to almost have to many options! 

So that is my experience with both PHPBB and VBulletin.   I would love to hear about your experiences and preferences between the two.  Have any pros or cons to add to the list?  You can write from the perspective of running either type of forum or from the user perspective (reading/posting) on either type of forum.  If you haven’t used either, you are welcome to share your experiences with BBPress.

I think there are a number of things we bloggers all have in common, and for the readers of this website, I hope that a love for WordPress is probably the biggest one. Have you ever wondered what you can do to help WordPress grow?

Here are a few ideas of things that just about anyone can do to help:

1. WordPress Plugin – This one requires you to be pretty fluent with PHP.   If you know coding well, though, this is probably the best thing you can do to improve WordPress.
2. WordPress Theme – Releasing a theme for the WordPress community to use is another great thing most people can do for WordPress.   If you look around, many of the more popular themes are fairly simplistic and don’t require an advanced design or a lot of features to be popular.
3. WordPress Blog – Building a WordPress niche blog seems to be the popular thing to do these days.   It is a lot of hard work, but if your passion runs deep the interaction with the WordPress community can be very rewarding.
4. WordPress Forums - Lorelle recently wrote a great post over at Blog Herald about helping out at the WordPress forums and how rewarding this can be.   If you don’t want to do any of the three above, give this one a shot.   I can quickly become addictive!

Anything else you would add to the list?

So far, today has started out great. In addition to the first round of the NCAA tournament starting off today, I just noticed that WordPress Hacks has reached its second milestone. Today is the first time we jumped the 1000 subscriber mark! Here is a quick screen shot I took to remember it by:

As for WordPress Hacks news, I am pleased to announce that we have added WordPress forums and a new theme to WordPress Hacks. I hope to have the forums stocked with information sometime this weekend. As for the theme change, this is only the first phase. I have a few more features to add, a comment section redesign to work on, and I am going to be adding more color to it in the coming weeks to try to make the theme a little brighter.

If the theme changes look a little familiar, that is because it was based upon Brian Gardner’s Revolution Pro theme. One thing many people don’t realize is that many of these premium WordPress themes are not designed specifically to be installed and activated (although most can be and will work well). They are designed to be used as templates for someone to create their own design. If you dig through Brian’s showcase, you can see tons of examples of people that have taken one of the Revolution designs and adjusted it to fit their needs.

Some things you’ll find now here at WordPress Hacks:

• A bigger emphasis on Gravatars – I’ve talked in the past about how I felt it was important to support Gravatars. In addition to finding them with the comments you leave, you’ll now also find them in the recent comments section of the sidebar.
• Recent trackbacks are now displayed – Whenever you send a trackback or pingback to WordPress Hacks, it will now be displayed in the sidebar with a link back to your website.
• Better emphasis on categories – In a recent review of WP Hacks, Ben Cook pointed out a couple things that he felt would improve our site. The first tip was that our archives need more emphasis. Our categories are now at the top and have drop-down’s for any children categories. His other tip will be addressed in phase two of the redesign.

The next phase will include more color and an improved comment section, among other things. In the meantime, if you run into any browser incompatibilities, please let us know. You can also let us know if there are any other improvements you would like to see.

Thanks again for supporting WordPress Hacks! The great readership support, comments, and community around this blog makes it so much fun to write for.

Not only does Brian Gardner of Revolution fame have some great Revolution themes available for sale, but Brian has also shown a tremendous talent for running and marketing his business. He just seems to get it.

First Brian decides to promote his products by offering an affiliate contest for this month and offers some amazing prizes, and now Brian has continued to add value to his product by releasing a series of free Revolution forum templates to compliment each of his premium WordPress themes. Currently the forum templates are for the popular free phpBB3 forum software, but it looks like he has plans to do the same for vBulletin users.

Here is a sample of how a few of these templates look:

Revolution Pro Media Forum Template

Revolution Magazine Forum Template

So, what does this mean for you as a potential buyer? If you purchase one of Brian’s Revolution themes (or if you have previously purchased one), you can now easily set up a corresponding forum to match the layout of your website, at no additional charge. This is one of the many benefits of purchasing a theme from Brian.