Love this company
Love this company. Loved the REIGN product. They were there the entire time helping me set things up; and when things went wrong? They were quick to take action and help find a solution.
Community engines
Reign + bbPress. Community engines integration.
bbPress is the WordPress forum plugin. Threaded discussions, user roles, replies.
Reign + bbPress for community sites that want a traditional forum alongside BuddyPress feeds.
The free alternative from us
Jetonomy does the same job in-house and installs free: Spaces, threaded discussions, Q&A with accepted answers, voting. On the paid plan: moderation queue, reputation, private spaces, and analytics. Reign styles it with no add-on, and bbPress stays fully supported either way.
See the free pluginsHow it works with Reign.
Reign ships a dedicated bbPress stylesheet, so forum indexes, topics and replies are styled to the theme instead of arriving in bbPress's very plain defaults, which is what most themes leave you with. The integration covers the forum templates themselves. What it cannot do is add features bbPress does not have, and that is the honest limit here: bbPress is a simple forum, and Reign makes a simple forum look good.
When to use it.
Use bbPress if you want the lightest possible forum bolted onto an existing site and nothing more. It is stable and it is simple. Where you want threaded discussion with Q&A, accepted answers and voting, our own Jetonomy does that, installs free and is built for communities rather than for comment threads. Reign styles both.
4 steps to ship.
1
Install bbPress (free).
2
Create forums, topics, replies.
3
Map BuddyPress groups to bbPress forums for per-group discussion.
4
Reign styles bbPress out of the box.
What to check once it is live.
Post a topic and a reply as a non-admin member, since permissions differ from your own. Confirm forum notifications arrive, check how a long topic reads on a phone, and verify that whatever you intended to keep private is not showing in search or in the forum index.
bbPress integration questions.
bbPress vs BuddyPress for forums?
BuddyPress is feed-style (real-time, ephemeral). bbPress is forum-style (threaded, durable, SEO-indexable). Pick bbPress for long-form Q&A, BuddyPress for daily chatter.
What does Jetonomy add over bbPress?
Jetonomy is our own forum and Q&A plugin and installs free: spaces, threaded discussion, accepted answers and voting in the free version, with a moderation queue, reputation and private spaces on Pro. bbPress stays supported for sites already built on it.
Does Reign make bbPress look modern?
It ships a dedicated bbPress stylesheet covering forum indexes, topics and replies, which lifts it well clear of the default appearance. It cannot add features bbPress does not have, so if you need voting or accepted answers, styling is not the thing you are missing.
bbPress or Jetonomy?
bbPress for the simplest possible forum on an existing site. Jetonomy when you want spaces, threaded discussion, Q&A with accepted answers and voting, which is a different shape of product. Jetonomy installs free, so trying it costs nothing but the time.
Is bbPress still maintained?
It is still available and widely deployed, though development has been quiet for some time, and that is worth weighing before building something long-term on it. If that concerns you, Jetonomy is actively developed, installs free, and covers forums with Q&A and accepted answers on top.
Pick a bundled kit.
The Reign theme is $99/year or $249 lifetime and it is the only required purchase. Kits bundle it with the add-ons that style a third-party stack. Or skip the third-party stack: Jetonomy is ours and installs free.