Turn Your WordPress Blog Into A Fully Functional Forum

Wordpress, as we all know is primarily an open source blogging platform, and a very good one at that. The developers and application programmer community of WP are continuously spreading its efforts to create a bigger and better blog. Various WP plugins (which are mostly free) adds features and functionality to the basic WP platform, improving esthetics’s and usability. There is a new Wordpress theme and a plugin that can essentially turn your WordPress blog into a full fledged forum.

You can find it here… Turn Your WordPress Blog Into A Forum, to see exactly how this theme/plugin combo works. So instead of conventionally ‘posting comments’ on a WP blog, the replies are instead turned into a forum reply. This gives the Blog/Forum visitors the opportunity to create their own “entry” as an response to the original blog post. Then the blog posts are listed in the chronological order as posted, starting from the last comment, rather than from the original blog’s published date.

Check Out WordPress Forum Demo

Any topics that go unread become highlighted, allowing you to easily identify where some new and additional conversation and activity can start. The WordPress Pages and the WP Categories can also be used as ‘Tabs’ (more of that on the site). The ‘TDO’s Forum’ theme can actually make your WP blog look exactly like a real forum.

Some Additional Features:
- Simple theme layout is easy to modify and customize
- AJAX Comment Preview (can be turned on/off)
- Comment Quick-Tags (can be turned on/off)
- Avatars for posters(can be turned on/off)
- Looks like an actual Forum
- RSS 2.0 Feed for forum posts
- Important posts can be made a “sticky”

The TDO forum theme currently operates through an external plugin. They are continuously tweaking the code to make it more reliable, and less dependent on it being a plugin, making it more easily accessible to Wordpress users.
Download The PlugIn Here