Simple:Press – WordPress Forum Plugin

Feature Summary

Simple:Press brings enterprise class forum capabilities to your WordPress site. It makes it easy to get your forum started with additional powerful features available as you need them.

Built for performance with custom tables, it is tightly integrated into WordPress’s user and security model and can easily scale up to thousands of users.

Unlike other Forum plugins, all of Simple:Press’s features are built and supported by one organization – no need to contact multiple vendors when you need support for a feature!

And Simple:Press has hundreds of features! Between the free functions and premium add-ons we likely have just about every feature you might need.

From multi-level forum structures to post threading and private messages, chances are that if you need a feature we have already built it. 13+ years of development has exposed us to all kinds of customer requirements and has helped us build a rock-solid product!

Import data into our forum from other forums including bbPress, Asgaros and others. Get the importer here.

Go premium! Our premium extension will super-charge your forum! View Simple-Press Forum Premium Pricing Options!

And, if you need to build a member focused site with forums and with or without paid subscriptions? We have you covered there too with our SaaS EasyMembershipSites.io.

What does the Simple:Press Forums plugin do?

Maybe the better question should be – what doesn’t it do when it comes to discussion forums? Here are just some of the features that are included for free!

Forums

• Unlimited Forums
• Forum Groups
• Sub-forums to any level
• Private and public forums
• Custom icons for each forum
• Lock forums
• Pin forums
• Always-on forum messages
• Breadcrumbs

User Management and Features

• Powerful user group and permission system
• Restrict user access to wp-admin
• Custom avatars

Topic/Thread Features

• Unlimited topics in a forum
• Lock topics (admin and moderators)
• Pin topics (admin and moderators)
• Move topics between forums
• Edit topic and topic titles

Post Features

• Unlimited posts in any topic
• Format posts with basic html
• Pin posts (admins and moderators)
• Smileys (admins can define, end user can select)

Post Management

• Unread post handling
• Post moderation
• Edit and delete posts
• Reassign posts
• Move posts between forums and topics

Administration

• Comprehensive administration options and settings
• Merge forums
• Flood control
• Supports WordPress’s privacy features for data deletion and data exports
• Assign forum admins without making them WordPress admins

Integration

• Fully integrated with WordPress registrations and logins
• Supports standard and multi-site versions of WordPress
• Complete uninstall/removal option

Ranking and Gamification

• Specify ranks based on the number of posts
• Upgrade user group membership as users progress through their ranks
• Assign special ranks to individual users that override the standard ranks
• Assign custom badges to each rank

Seo

• Customizable forum slug
• Featured forum images used by the Open Graph meta tag
• Multiple options for the browser display and title

Login and Registration

• Use the standard WP login and registration screens
• Use alternate custom login and registration screens (such as those from membership and ecommerce plugins)
• Specify custom redirect pages after login and registration

User and Profile Features

• Custom avatars or use Gravatars
• Set preferred editor (if multiple editors are installed)
• Allow or disallow signatures
• Post as guest without requiring registration or login (optional)

Theming

• Fully theme and template driven
• Choose from a selection of free and premium themes
• Custom CSS overrides
• Integrated icons and iconsets
• Customize colors and font sizes to match your brand
• Inherit font settings from your WordPress theme

General and Misc

• Extensive help
• Help text on every admin element
• Smileys and custom smiley files
• Global custom messages for certain events

Premium Options

You can purchase a premium extension that adds hundreds of additional feature points – use them to take your forum to the next level!

From integrated Analytics with beautiful charts to Push Notifications via sms and email, we have just about everything you might need to run a successful forum!

You can get all of our premium functions with one of three premium pricing options – check them all out at simple-press.com.

Premium Functions

Below is a list of some of the functionality you will find in the premium version:

• Analytics (Colorful charts with data about your forum)
• Ads (Sophisticated advertising engine inside the forum)
• Private messaging system (lets users send private messages to each other)
• Push Notifications via SMS, Pushover, PushBullet and Slack
• WooCommerce dashboard integration
• Reputation System
• Topic Subscriptions (with email notifications)
• Warnings and Suspensions (Warn users before suspending them from the forum)
• Custom user profile fields (Collect additional information in each user profile)
• Answers Topics (mark topics as answered)
• Post ratings (rate a post – thumbs up / down or star rating levels)
• Post by email (start a topic or respond to a post by email)
• Topic Status (set a status on a topic – great when you’re using forums as a help-desk tool)
• Polls (designated users can create topics or posts with polls)
• Image, media and file uploader (designated users can upload files and other media to topics and posts)
• Blog post linking (automatically link blog posts you make to a new forum topic)
• TinyMCE Editor (full featured editor)
• Threading (up to nine nested reply levels – lets see you do that Facebook groups!)
• Template tags and widgets (php functions you can use throughout your website to display forum information and statistics)
• BuddyPress Integration
• Share This (easily allow users to share posts and topics to social media)
• Search Integration (use the simple:press forum search field to search both forum posts and contents of pages and blog posts)
• Admin Bar (a front-end tool for admins and moderators to easily manage the forum without going to wp-admin)
• Post preview
• Mentions (@mention functionality with email notifications)
• Watches
• Tags (add tags to topics)
• XML Sitemap (create xml site maps for search engines)
• MYCred Integration
• HTML Emails (format outgoing emails with html)
• Private posts (make posts private – great for help desks or customer collabaration)
• BBCode Editor
• HTML Editor
• Post Thanks (Thank users for a post)
• Captcha
• Uploads Viewer
• Post As (Allow certain users to post as another user)
• Search by user (Enhances the forum search functions to search by user)
• Profanity Filter
• Auto linking (Automatically create links in posts based on certain keywords – great for advertising or revenue generation)
• Add user Identities (sometimes Facebook, Twitter and Linked-in identities just aren’t enough…)
• Keywords (get notifications on posts based on keywords you specify)
• Syntax Highlighting (accepting posts with code? Syntax highlighting helps!)
• Hide Posters (hide the names of users who post)
• Ban (ban users)
• Gravatar Cache (Cache gravatars instead of looking them up each time – great for improving performance on heavy sites)
• Who’s Online
• Post Anonymously (allow users to post without showing their user name in the thread)
• Print topic
• Membership Subscribes (an admin tool to help manage membership subscriptions en-masse)
• Language and theme selection (allow users to select the forum theme and language on the front-end).
• Report post (allow users to flag posts for reporting)
• Font resizer (users can resize the font used in the forum without having to resize the font on the entire webpage)
• Unanswered Topics (list unanswered topics)
• Birthdays (allow user to enter birthdays in their user profile)
• Rank Information
• Topic Description (users can add a topic description when starting new topics)
• Topic Expired (force topics to expire and disappear from view after a certain date)
• Topic Redirect (create topics that link directly to an exteranal url)
• Topic ID Permalinks (force use of IDs for topic permalinks)
• Policy Documents (add privacy and terms-of-use document directly beneath your forum)
• Slack Integration (great admin tool for slack notifications)
• Post in multiple forums (post a single topic into multiple forums simultaneously)
• Remove spam registrations (integrated with Akismet to flag spam)
• Event logger (admin tool to view events)
• Featured Topics and Posts (set certain topics as featured and then use php code to display them anywhere on your site)
• Maintenance (set the forum to maintenance mode without putting your entire site into maintenance mode)
• Profile Display Control (determine which user profile tabs can be visible on the front-end)
• Prune Database (remove old topics from the database)
• Moderation Email (send email notification to admins when a topic needs moderation)
• Timezone on Registration (collect user time zone on registration)

Premium Options
Purchase one of our premium bundles to get premium support directly from us. View Pricing Options
Or, use our SaaS version at Easy Membership Sites

Compatibility
Simple:Press was built to be compatible with most themes, both free and commercial.

Languages

Simple:Press is available in a variety of languages and volunteers and customers are always adding more! Portions of the plugin have been translated into 20+ languages by our users and volunteers. These include German, Portuguese(BR), Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Persian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and more!
View our translation site

Team

Our core developers are:

• Andy Staines
• Steve Klasen
• Muhammad Tahir Nazir