Build a Forum Around Your Blog with gForums

I have talked about in the past about various ways you can improve your blog and take it to the next level. Adding a job board, a Wiki, and a forum to your blog are all great ways to solidify your community and make people want to come back to your blog for more. Many bloggers don’t want to use with too many scripts. They take time to master WordPress but don’t want to do the same with a service such as vBulletin. It’s true that vBulletin has a lot of forum features not found in other packages on the market, but you don’t need ot use vBulletin to add a discussion board to your blog.

gForums is a pretty unique WordPress theme that turns your blog into a fully-fledged forum. And you won’t have to touch vBulletin or any other piece of software to get it done. In order to take full advantage of gForums, you want to install it in a sub-directory or sub-domain of your blog. So you are going to need a new WordPress install to start your own WordPress forum. But the rest is pretty easy. The theme is very easy to customize and comes with standard features you would expect from a forum software.

The theme comes with member pages, image slide-show, and report buttons to let you manage your board more effectively. Security is always going to be an issue with forum software, but since you are using WordPress to power up your forum, you have plenty of security plugins that you can take advantage of to protect your forum.

The theme is pretty affordable and comes with the PSD files you need to customize the look and feel of your forum. The code is not hidden, so you can always change the code if you are not satisfied with what you get. So as it turns out, you don’t have to use vBulletin or PHPBB to start your very own forum. All you need is WordPress.