Integrated Forum for Thesis Theme Without Coding

Would you like to have a Forum on your Thesis site without messing with code?

We set one up on Beyond 2012 HQ using Simple:Press Forum plugin for WordPress. This post shows you how simple it is. In the screenshot below you will see there is even a tab for the “Beyond 2012 Forum” in the navigation menu/tabs.

You can see the Forum is fully integrated with the customized Thesis Theme site. The home page of Beyond 2012 HQ looks like this…

The following steps will show you how to do it for your own Thesis site – or any other site. This plugin is not just for Thesis.

While there are tutorials out there to show you how to integrate phpBB forum – you have to mess with the code and for newbies this is troublesome. One such tutorial, with lots of coding to do as can be seen by a sample screenshot below, is here.

However, if you want to do it simply, I recommend using a simple plugin “Simple:Press – the forum plugin for WordPress.”

Using Simple:Press forum plugin means you can easily…

• replicate your settings on all of your other Thesis sites
• turn it off if you need to (aka uninstall)
• change your settings from your WordPress dashboard, no need to go to your code/server

Step 1 – Get the Simple:Press Plugin

To get the plugin, you’ll have to download it from the Simple:Press site. It isn’t available via the Plugins “Get More Plugins” link in your dashboard yet. I will update this post when I notice that it is.

Once you have uploaded the plugin to your WordPress plugins folder on your server, just activate it in your dashboard and tweak your settings.

Step 2 – Tweak your Forum Settings

Once you’ve activated the Simple:Press forum plugin, you will find it below “Comments” in your Dashboard. I recommend you work your way down the column, selecting your options.

Clicking “Forums” will give you the opportunity to adjust options like…

Creating Groups & Forums

Start with “Create New Group” and work your way across. “Create New Forum” is the equivalent of a category in your forum.

Once you’ve set up your Group Name (for Beyond 2012 HQ we used the site name) you can add Forums.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can order your forums (aka categories) by sequence number instead of having them in alphabetical order or by date order. There are also RSS feed addresses for each discussion for people to use to follow or for you to use as links in articles.

Step 3 – Extra Reminder About Forum Permission Settings

One of the most important things to do, if you want your Forum to be user friendly, is to allow guests to post comments without needing to register – especially when you are building a fan-base. You can change this at any time. I recommend using the “Add Global Permission Set” button and giving Guests “Limited Access” or if you are game “Standard Access”. Read only access will not let casual visitors comment like many are used to being able to do on your blog.

• Don’t forget to set permissions for Members.

Step 4 – Getting Ready to Put Your Forum In Your Navigation Menu

In forum “Options”, make selections from the “Global” tab to give your forum a page slug of “forum”.

This will give your forum a url address of “http://YourSiteName/forum”.

• You will need this link url to add your forum to your navigation menu on your Thesis site.

You can also adjust your breadcrumb trail on this tab, so your breadcrumb plugin (if you use one) works the same on your forum as it does throughout the rest of your site.

Add some style while you are here

While you are in “Options”, you will also have the chance to select options for “Style“. Experiment with the different looks and how they blend in with your site. You can make customizations (you can explore the Simple:Press forum for ways to do this). I like to use whatever comes in the box so I don’t have to do anything extra whenever I update the plugin.

For Beyond 2012 HQ, we use the forum skin “olota” and the “two-en” forum icons set. It blends in nicely with our colour scheme.

For the next part, SAVE your Forum settings and then switch to your “Links” tab in your dashboard.

Step 5 – Create a Link Category For Your Navigation Tabs/Menu

Create a Link Category that you will call as your Navigation Menu on your site.

In Thesis you have a choice of categories, pages and links to use as navigation/menu options. You may use a mixture.

For the sake of simplicity, on Beyond 2012 HQ, we just use the one “Nav” category. You can then add link urls to this category. You don’t have to do it this way. You may choose just to add your Forum link.

Edit your Link Category. On our Thesis site  Beyond 2012 HQ, we added the “Beyond 2012 Forum” page link (created in Step 4 above = “forum page slug”) to a link category called “Nav”. We call this link category to be included in the navigation menu tabs.

• In the screenshot above you will also see we include links to other categories. To get your link category urls, go to your category archive page and copy and paste it from there.
• You can also add external pages in this Nav category. We use this process to include links to the official Thesis Theme site in the nav menu on this site.

Step 6 – Select Your Nav Menu Contents

Above is a screenshot of the Thesis Options panel. We are interested in the “Navigation Menu” part.

Where it says “Add more links”:

• Select from the drop down menu.
• Select the link category that contains your forum link and the categories you want to inlcude. We called ours  “Nav”.
• If you want to add additional categories or pages, you can do this as well. Not everyone will include all of their desired nav menu links in the way we have. If you only have your forum link by itself in a category, it will be the only additional link you add in this drop down box.

If you don’t use Thesis Theme, this will be the only step that is different.