Description

Important upgrade notes
Updating from 5.x to 6.x should be done manually! See this document for details.
Updating from 6.1.x or 6.2.x to 6.3.x will require new versions of your add-ons so please make sure you update those after updating to 6.3.x.

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!

Need to build a member focused site with our without paid subscriptions? We have you covered there too with deep integration into our Member Manager and Member Subscriptions plugins!

Go premium! A premium bundle of our add-ons will super-charge your forum! Simple-Press Forum Pricing Options!

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!

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

User Management and Features

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

Post Management

Unread post handling
Post moderation

Administration

Comprehensive administration options and settings
Merge forums
Flood control

Integration

Fully integrated with WordPress registrations and logins
Supports standard and multi-site versions of WordPress
Complete uninstall/removal option
Integrates with our Member Manager plugin
Integrates with our Member Subscriptions plugin

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

Theming

Fully theme and template driven
Choose from a selection of free and premium themes
Custom CSS overrides
Integrated icons and iconsets

General and Misc

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

Premium Extensions

With our premium extensions you can 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 extensions in one of three bundles – check out your options at simple-press.com.

Extensions

Analytics (Colorful charts with data about your forum)
Ads (Sophisticated advertising engine inside the forum)
Private messaging system
Push Notifications via SMS, Pushover and PushBullet
WooCommerce dashboard integration
Reputation System
Topic Subscriptions (with email notifications)
Warnings and Suspensions
Custom user profile fields
Answers Topics
Post ratings
Post by email
Topic Status
Polls
Image, media and file uploader
Blog post linking
TinyMCE Editor
Threading
Template tags and widgets
BuddyPress Integration
Share This
Search
Admin Bar
Post preview
Mentions
Watches
Tags
XML Sitemap
MYCred Integration
HTML Emails
Private posts
Achievements Integration
Cubepoints Integration
BBCode Editor
HTML Editor
Post Thanks
Captcha
Uploads Viewer
Post Ask
Search by user
Profanity Filter
Auto linking
Add user Identities
Keywords
Syntax Highlighting
Hide Posters
Ban
Gravatar Cache
Who’s Online
Post Anonymously
Print topic
Membership Subscriber
Language and theme selection
Report post
Font resizer
Unanswered Topics
Birthdays
Rank Information
Topic Description
Topic Expired
Topic Redirect
Topic ID Permalinks*
Policy Documents
Slack Integration
Post in multiple forums
Remove spam registrations
Event logger
Featured Topics and Posts
Maintenance
Profile Display Control
Prune Database
Moderation Email
Timezone on Registration

Premium Bundles
Purchase one of our bundles to get premium support directly from us
View Pricing Options

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

Screenshots

Main front-end screen using our REBOOT theme
Main admin screen
Dashboard with premium statistics module

Installation

Using The WordPress Dashboard

Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard
Search for ‘Simple Press’
Click ‘Install Now’
Activate the plugin on the Plugin dashboard

Uploading in WordPress Dashboard

Download simplepress.zip from this page
Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard
Navigate to the ‘Upload’ area
Select simplepress.zip from your computer
Click ‘Install Now’
Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Using FTP

Download simplepress.zip from this page
Extract the simplepress directory to your computer
Upload the simplepress directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Setup

Whatever the method you used, after you activated the plugin through the plugins dashboard, you now need to run through a set-up process. This creates the tables and default data that the plugin requires.
You can access this setup process by either clicking the INSTALL button that should be visible at the top of the admin pages or by going to FORUM->INSTALL.

At the conclusion of a successful install, a button will be displayed to load the forum admin and clicking on this will take you to the Storage Locations panel. All being well, all locations will be ticked as created and available but if this is not the case follow the instructions to manually create folders if necessary.

Getting Started

Now that you have installed your forums read our getting started pages.

FAQ

I’ve installed the plugin – now what?: Now that you have installed your forums read our getting started pages.
I don’t receive e-mail notifications: There are several factors that can influence e-mail notifications delivery. The best thing you can do to diagnose email delivery issues is to install a plugin that shows you an email log. We recommend MAILGUN or SMTP POST. The logs will let you know if emails are being generated and not delivered or just not being generated at all.

Reviews

SSmeredith 6 ខែមករា, 2020

Client was unhappy with bbpress and we successfully migrated their huge forum over to Simplepress. Excellent support throughout the process. Really the only viable WordPress integrated forum out there to handle heavy traffic sites. Thank you!

6 ខែវិច្ឆិកា, 2019

Been using Simple Press forum software for 10 years now - since Sep 2009. It’s simply the most reliable and best supported of all our plugins and users love it. It can be configured pretty thoroughly. Most important of all, support is just fantastic. Rapid responses and quick advice or even fixes when required. On one occasion, the main tech guy actually went into my site to diagnose a specific problem. That was over 3 years ago and I have not had to engage support since then. Updates come out a few times a year – not too often to be a nuisance – but essentially the system has settled down and common teething troubles have mostly all been knocked on the head. It’s a mature piece of software. I would not hesitate to recommend it to any WP user and it’s well worth the modest cost for something so solid and worthwhile. The negative comments below just don’t make any sense to me.

organicsulfur4health 29 ខែសីហា, 2019

I had been maintaining a Mingle Forum on my WP site for 6 years and neglected to make any changes after the developer stopped providing updates to his plugin. I belatedly decided to take the plunge to migrate my forum content to another developer. I first tried bbPress and their converter did a poor job of converting my archived data. Various forum posts were missing after conversion, so I did some further research and decided to install Simple:Press and its conversion tool. Voila! I've got a working forum with all my old data and have stopped getting error messages from SiteLock that the discontinued Mingle Forum 1.0.35 plugin suffers from privilege escalation CSRF.

David Decker 22 ខែឧសភា, 2019

Thanks to the Simple:Press team for continuing the plugin and releasing a 6.x version! I maintain a site with this forum plugin for a client and we could successfully migrate over. We are glad for the updates and all worked out great. One thing we think is now really good, is the child theme system for the forum themes. Finally we can make updates without hassle. Keep up the good work and let future improvements come! 😉

epppppp 19 ខែឧសភា, 2019

I've used Simple Press since 2008. Nobody wants to pay for anything, myself included. However, it's a very good product and things have really changed in the last 10 years! For one thing, many plugins cost money and/or require a subscription. Simple Press is a robust system that provides pretty much, every feature you might want for your forum. Further, if there is something new you want, the new team is incredibly responsive. For example, I asked for a plugin that would allow me to insert ads to better monetize my forum. The team added this ability within a month. That's impressive. If you've been at this for any amount of time, you know how important it is, that plugins are maintained. The new owners are keeping up. The lack of gratitude with these low ratings is appalling. I recall the months of angst, knowing the original plugin authors were going to retire. We were all going to be stuck with a forum that would have to be converted at some point and what? We'd have to pay for that, one way or the other. We are very lucky the buyer came in to save. I would hate to see the fee go any higher but I do think the forum and the plugins are worth $99 a year. There are rarely any problems and anything that does come up is quickly resolved in a professional manner.

FashionGHANA 14 ខែវិច្ឆិកា, 2019

super

Read all 12 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Simple:Press – WordPress Forum Plugin” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Translate “Simple:Press – WordPress Forum Plugin” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

6.3.0

New
- A completely overhauled admin screen. This requires new versions of many plugins.
Fix
- G00000: Resolve an issue with legacy lifetime licenses reporting zero days before expiration.
- G00070: Resolve an issue where saving default role -> user group mappings didn’t work. You couldn’t set the same group to map to multiple roles.

6.2.1

Fix
- G00068: Resolve an issue with wpColorPicker not being loaded properly. This affected a lot of the admin screens including the ability to create a new forum.

6.2.0

New
- Iconsets – allow forum and other graphics to be selected from font-awesome and other icomoon compatible iconsets.
Improved
- G00055: Use codemirror for CSS editor in WP 4.9 or later.
Fix
- G00054: Resolve an issue with ordering and sorting forums.
- G00057: Update the filename used to pull information about translations for the Simple:Press dashboard.
- G00000: Remove an errant period that was appearing in a message in the licensing screen.
- G00058: Editing CSS for themes did not work in prior 6.x versions.
- G00021: Uploading smileys in the admin area threw an error in the debug.log file.
- G00000: Increase the timeout used when manually checking for plugin updates. The prior value of 5000 was too low so its now set to 50000.

6.1.0

New
- G0039: Added Instagram Identity
- G0000: Added easy digital downloads license integration
- G0000: Added a button to take users to review simple:press on wordpress.org
Improved
- G0046: Add the option to show/hide forum rank labels on the front-end members list screen via the template tag.
- G0038: Remove identities that no longer make sense.
- G0038: Add option to FORUM->OPTIONS->MEMBER SETTINGS to allow display of deprecated identities.
- G0037: Add option for a 2nd custom message above the editor (FORUM->COMPONENTS->CUSTOM MESSAGES). This way you can have a different custom message for new topics vs new posts.
- G0010: Add editors to messages fields in FORUM->COMPONENTS->CUSTOM MESSAGES
- G0000: Made radio buttons in admin look like radio buttons instead of checkboxes.
Fix
- G0000: Update the text for the customization service on the help and troubleshooting page.
- G0036: Fix plugin library link on help and plugin page.
- G0012: Fix pricing plan link on help and plugin page.
- G0011: Fix theme library link on help and plugin page.
- G0007: Radio buttons should look like radio buttons in the admin area.
- G0004: URL for Premium Support link on plugins page is incorrect
- G0005: URL for Documentation link on plugins page is incorrect
- G0003: Move post to existing topic not working
- G0002: Move post to new topic form css issue
- G0001: Fix Malformed changelog url
- G0000: Spelling and grammar related changes to help files for the FORUM->COMPONENT->CUSTOM MESSAGES screen
Dev
- G0000: Added new function to allow editors to be painted in admin
- G0000: Added new function to allow date pickers to be painted in admin – utilizes the JqueryUI Date Picker library from WP.
- G0000: Added additional icons to the icon font file to be used by the new Analytics and Ad plugins.
Other
- This is the first version being built and deployed from our github repository

6.0.6

Fix
- M-5993: Locked forums/topics were allowing user to post despite being locked

6.0.5

New
- GDPR Enhancement – allow option to annoymize posts or delete posts
Fix
- Current user re-assignment to Guest status does not remove IP address from posts
- Delete User from WP admin screen – SP radio buttons malformed
- Incorrect function being called when filtering PRE tags.
- Handle simplepress and simple-press in CSS selector for nav menu icons
- General and Miscellaneous Cleanups

6.0.4

Fix
- Issue with installation into a folder with a name other than simple-press
- Issue with new installations and the sample data that is installed

6.0.3

New
- First version released on WordPress.org.