This tutorial will walk you through how to add a discussion forum to your WordPress page. Discussion forums are a great way to facilitate conversations on your site. If you’re using your FI site for a course you are teaching, forums are the perfect way to hold a discussion with your class online. Not to worry, forums can be both private and public!

In order to build a forum on your site, BuddyPress is required. BuddyPress is a really powerful plugin which helps transform a normal WordPress site into an online community, by adding members, groups, forums, and many other useful features. If you’ve built your site on the FI network, it comes installed with BuddyPress.

4 Easy Steps

Step 1: Log into your site and go to your site’s dashboard. On the dashboard, go to Forums and click on New Forum.

Step 2: On the Create New Forum page fill in the necessary information, including the forum’s Title and Description of the forum. Also, make sure to set your Visibility settings. If you would like your discussion forum to be completely public keep the default visibility setting to Public. If you would like your forum to be Private, which requires a password to view, set visibility to Private.

Step 3: After completing the necessary information, click Publish. A notification should appear at the top of the page stating “Forum Created. View forum”. To check that you created the forum successfully click on View forum.

Success! Congrats, you have successfully created a discussion forum 😊

For questions or tech support from the Futures Initiative web developers, please contact support@futuresinitiative.org.