How to Integrate PhpBB forum to Wordpress ?

One way to increase the page views and user participation on your wordpress blog is to introduce a discussion board. Of course, you should have a good reader base for the discussion board to function well. And there are theories that a discussion board will take the limelight from the blog and that it could harm your reader base.

I think it might be a good idea to add a forum/discussion board to your blog,

- if the topic of your blog is “discussion based” and

- if there are lot of people asking questions frequently on the comments section.

Of course, with the Threaded comments plugin it is easier to continue discussion on the blog itself but there are a few advantages to having an  exclusive forum.

• Unique content
  With every new thread, you open the opportunity to having exclusive and unique content, which is good food for the search engines.
• SEO
  With optimizing the forums (like PhpBB and Vanilla), you have a higher chance to target more terms on the search engines.
• Owner – User interaction
  What if Seth Godin and John Chow had forums? Or Matt Cutts ? There would be a lot of interaction with them and the readers right? Of course they might not have the time, but yes forums are necessary for discussions.

So how do you integrate a PhpBB forum with your wordpress blog?

1. Install a PhpBB forum at a convenient location. (Free installation available on most popular hosts)
2. Download and install this cool  Wordpress-PhpBB integration plugin.
3. Configure it and add the widgets.

Yea, no messy db integration and stuff. It’s a fairly simple process providing some very basic integration like when posting new content/article on the blog, it also creates a thread in the PhpBB installation. You can also add a widget featuring the latest posts on the wordpress blog.