The Best Forum Component for Joomla

Including a forum in any website is a great way of communicating with your audience. If you maintain your site in Joomla!, there are quite a few options to look when thinking about integrating forum functionality. Here are a few things to consider before you take the plunge.

Complete Integration?

Its important to know that even though the forum components available for Joomla! have improved in the recent years, they are not as good as the stand alone forum software systems like phpBB or Simple Machines etc. So the first thing to ask yourself is do you really want the forum to be completely integrated into Joomla! or you just want it to be accessible from within your Joomla! site.

Installing a forum component within Joomla! makes the forum look more relevant to the site and blends in better than the stand alone option. It is also easier to maintain and back up the forum data.

On the other hand, if you have a stand alone forum sub-domain(which is the best way to install a forum outside of your site), it will have better functionality independent from the Joomla system. It will also give you the ability to split the site and forum and operate them independently and also easier to separate them into unique domains.

Made your Choice?

Now that you have made the decision of which way you want to integrate your forum into your site, lets look at some good options you have to do so.

Joomla! Forum Components

Kunena

The best forum component that we have used for Joomla! is Kunena. It is very easy to install and setup and has a variety of themes to choose from to blend it in into the other components. It fully integrates with Community Builder and uses its user profile data when showing user details.

Comunity Builder also has plugins for Kunena which can show the user’s posts and karma etc on the user profile page.

Kunena also comes with various modules that can easily show the latest topics or posts etc on any page on the Joomla! site.

Agora

Another forum component that can be used for Joomla! sites is Agora. Agora has similar functionalities as Kunena but takes a little while to get used to and make it work with the rest of the site.

Simplest Forum

Simplest Forum is is no fuss simple forum component that is very easy to work with. The forum has minimal styling which makes it blend in a bit more easily. Its a component to look at if you forum will be be seldom visited by your audience and its more of a showcase rather than having much use.

Stand Alone Forum Integration

If you chose to have a stand alone forum installation, the easiest way to do it is to have a sub domain for that forum and install that software in that folder. Once you have the forum up and running its time to integrate it into the main Joomla! site.

Forum Bridges

A Forum bridge lets you sync and integrate any outside forum with your existing Joomla! site. Various Forum Bridges are available for Joomla! in the Extensions directory.

One popular bride is the Rokbridge for integrating with phpBB.

SMF Joomla! Bridge is popular for Simple Machines Forum.

Conclusion

If you have decided to integrate a forum completely into Joomla! or just bridges to an outside Forum component, we hope this information is helpful to you. In either case, once you have a forum up and running, be sure to have more hits and more user participation in your web site.

Your Turn

Have you used forum components for Joomla!? What is your experience with them? Do you have any suggestions? Use the comments section to tell us your story.