WordPress is terrific blogging platform or blog publishing system, but when it comes to facilitate community discussion, forums prove to be a much better choice. Thus, a lot of WordPress blogs add forums to the site as user base grows. This situation creates some inconveniences or oddities such as two login details for WordPress and forums, separate discussions for comments in WordPress and threads in forums, and different layout. To solve the problem above, it’s best to integrate the forums with the WordPress blog.

For webmasters who have choose bbPress package as Internet forums solution, the integration of bbPress forum to WordPress blog gets little easier with the release of bbSync. bbSync is a WordPress plugin that can make new bbPress forum topics or threads for each and every new WordPress posts, and integrates comments in WordPress with replies in the forum threads. Comments made through WordPress comments form will also be posted to corresponding bbPress thread as replies. To achieve full integration between the forums and WordPress blog, bbSync also allows comments section in WordPress template be replaced with <?php felbbreplies(); ?> function with customizable layout which will fetch and show all replies from the corresponding topics in forum.

Download latest version of bbSync (bbsync.zip – only supports legacy bbPress 1.1 and has been retired). To use it, upload bbsync.php to WordPress plugins directory (remember that it’s a WordPress plugin) and the activate the plugin at Plugins menu in WordPress administration. To replace comments in WordPress completely with forums, replace comments function in WordPress template with <?php felbbreplies(); ?> function.