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.

When it comes to creating a forum for your blog, there you several choices available to you. You could always use phpBB, or even pay for VBulletin, but this might not be ideal if you are trying to integrate it with an existing WordPress blog.

If you’d like to try a popular alternative, I recommend you check out the RS Discuss WordPress plugin. With this plugin, you can easily add a simple bulletin board forum to your WordPress blog. You will then get all of the functionality of a regular forum, including the ability to set administrators/moderators. Other benefits include multiple language support and an RSS feed that users can have to monitor your forums.

The only major downside I’ve found with this plugin is that it requires you to allow user registration on your actual blog. I’ve also seen it mentioned somewhere that the current version of this plugin may have problems with the WordPress 2.3 tagging system.

Otherwise, you should have everything you need!

Update: If you find RS Discuss isn’t for you, check out this post which covers integrating a forum with WordPress. The post covers a variety of different forum options and provides a lot of useful information associated with it.