ReGoHo

There are quite a few blog owners who want to host their own forum. This enables them to extend their community, enhance communication and let user generate their own contents. If you are one of these blog owners, read our recommendations below.

You might be on a big budget but that is likely not the case. If you have some money to spend you can chose forum software like VBulletin which provide a full featured bulletin board experience. Otherwise your best choice would be the free phpBB. PhpBB is an open-source bulletin software that provides a very easy way to setup a forum. It is just as easy to install as WordPress. Of course, you will need a webserver and a hoster supporting PHP.

Once phpBB is installed you need to setup the forum structure by creating forums and subforums. If you are happy with the custom appearance. There is nothing more for you to do here. However, you usually will want the forum to appear with the same skin as your blog. To achieve this, you will have to port the blog’s CSS to phpBB. This is a more complicated process and you might want to let a skilled programmer do this (ask ReHoGo… we can include this in your webhosting package).

An alternative to a tailor-made CSS it to use a theme that supports both: the blog and the forum. For WordPress and phpBB exist the socalled “Revolution Themes” by Brian Gardner. They are premium themes that perfectly blend your blog and your forum into each other.