By introducing a discussion board, you can increase user participation and the page views on your wordpress blog.
It would be good to add a forum/discussion board to your blog if:
1)there are many people asking questions frequently on the comments section and
2)the topic of your blog is “discussion based”
I am sure, it is easier to continue discussion on the blog itself with the Threaded comments plugin but there are some advantages to having an exclusive forum.
Unique and exclusive content
With every new thread, you open the great chance to having unique and exclusive content, which is good food for the search engines.
SEO
With optimizing the forums (like Vanilla and PhpBB), you have a bigger chance to target more and more terms on the search engines.
Owner – User interaction
Forums are necessary for discussions.
So can you integrate a PhpBB forum with your wordpress blog?
1)Install a PhpBB forum at a convenient location. (Free installation also available)
2)Download and install this cool WordPress-PhpBB integration plugin
3)Configure it and add the widgets
No messy db integration and stuff. It is really a simple process that provides some basic integration like when posting new article/ content 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.
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