What forum solution do you recommend?

Ok, I know this might sound a bit weird, but we are looking to integrate a discussion board within our blog and really like this one. Yes, the one made by the guys at Bootstrapped.fm.

Just wondering if this is an off-the-shelf kind of solution (e.g. theme, plugin, etc) of if this is pure custom development?

In alternative, which forum solutions would you recommend to integrate well with WP?

We tried already quite a few and the one that I like the most is Bublaa - though they don’t let users register on your site (they keep the emails).

Cheers

bootstrapped.fm is using http://www.discourse.org/

I use Phorum.org, which is good enough and quite customizable. Development has slowed down significantly so if I were picking a new one I’m not sure what I’d go with.

Thanks Oliver! To be honest, I’m dropping an email to the Discourse guys, to see if they can hand out a copy. Otherwise, I would probably stick with phpBB (very similar to Phorum) that has a lot of custom themes and styles on Themeforest. The back-end is pretty awesome too!

Said that, would love to try out Discourse: it’s a totally new forum concept

Dan

Discourse is freely available:

They even give you instructions on how to install it, if you are new to it. There is also a Wordpress plugin, though I haven’t used it.

Please don’t use phpBB. It s very ugly, hard to use, and the search function really sucks. Everytime I am forced to register for a phpBB forum, a part of me dies a little

I use Vanilla Forums. And I like it. It’s free to host yourself (IIRC) and there’s a paid hosting option, which I use. I probably wouldn’t use it if I started now, because they increased their monthly fee fivefold. But I’m “grandfathered in” at the old rate.