There are several main ways how to create a strong community around your product, service or site. To set up a forum is one of best choices. The variety of different platforms available at the web market allows to build any forum with a great number of functionalities. IP.Board and bbPress provide excellent possibilities to grow your community quickly and without much efforts required. Both platforms include professional tools; however, each of them have their own pros and cons.
IP. Board, also known as Invision Power Board, is the forum software that provides wide range of opportunities to manage your content and improve a range of capabilities. IP.Board is PHP-based platform with its source code written accurately and carefully that makes it a reliable choice for developers. Since IP Board needs PHP, it gives an opportunity to use Linux, Windows or MacOS Server. At first, it was a free software, but now it has evolved to a commercial platform, that means you will need to spend a lot of money to have additional features, such as gallery, blog, etc. That’s the main reason why IP.Board is not so popular among average users. In most cases, you can use an alternative – bbPress.
bbPress provides a countless number of possibilities to make a forum run successfully. It is one of the most popular forum platforms on the Internet. The fact that WordPress developers designed it has also influenced its popularity. Following WordPress footsteps, bbPress is light-weight board that provides its users with a simple source code and intuitive back-end. The platform is free, and this is another good reason to use it. bbPress is suitable for any project and has many additional modules to improve its functionality. So, if you don’t have strong programming skills you can install this software and create your own forum within several hours or even minutes.
If you are currently running IP. Board, but want to move to a more flexible bbPress – check out the following infographic. It will clearly show you how to transfer content from one platform to another with no difficulties.
