Simple:Press Plugin Review

Hey everyone. After posting a rant about bbpress and bulletin boards in general last week, I´m back with a review about a WordPress plugin called Simple:Press. It´s a Forum for your WordPress powered Site.

I closed my last post on that topic with mentioning the TDO Mini Forms Forum and that i found it too ugly to test it extensively, at least for the post i was writing some days ago. I was looking at it through the week and didn´t like it all. Then i read about Simple:Press on weblogtoolscollection.com. I never heard of that plugin, but it has to have a big following, since the Alexa rank for their site is in the 50k’s. Yes Alexa isn´t that accurate, but you have to cheat much to get into the first 100k ; ) I downloaded the plugin, since I couldn´t find it in the WP Repository. On their download page they say that it´s better to install the plugin manually, because upload-limit on many servers is 2MB and the zip file with the plugin is actually 2.1MB. Wouldn´t be a problem for me since my upload limit is 8MB, but doesn´t matter at all. While i was uploading all the files (1162, 106 folders), i looked through their site. Their Navigation doesn´t make sense, because they have a folding menu on the right side, like you have in your wp-admin on the left, but only have one link inside of every tab?! Boy, I already thought that plugin might be senseless as well. But we´ll see…

Installation:

After Uploading all the files to your plugins folder I activated the plugin and switched to the forum tab that appeared instantly. It´s an automatic installation, and goes pretty fast. When installation finished, i was informed that 2 errors occurred while installing the forum. The Error Messages where clear and exactly told me what to do. In my case the plugin wasn´t able to create folders for avatars and smileys, due to my server permissions. It´s always nice when error messages are clear and understandable. I fixed the issues, looked if the forum appeared on my site navigation (it did) and how it looked. The Forum Front page is actually set up as a normal WordPress page, but i temporarily broke it when I edited the page, so you better don´t try to do that.

Customizing Options and setting up  forums:

Let´s take a look at the administration menu. The options are pretty clear and there´s also a help button for every option. the help displays on the page in an movable ajax window and doesn´t take you to another page, which is very good. Only downside here is the “update all options” button, which is a little bit tiny and looks like an small ad banner. i´d love to see that one also on top and not only at the bottom. After playing around with the options i realized that I should actually set up some forums and post some stuff that I can see how it will look. While i added a category (called group here) i was confused for the first time, because i had to give access permissions for the different user groups. i could tell the difference between no access, read only access and moderator access, but the difference between limited access, standard access and full access got me thinking. Of course, this is no major issue and under “manage permissions” you find the answer to this question. But i think it would be nice if this was included into the help window. So I created a group and a sub-forum, customized some more options (there are plenty of them, so you can really make it work as you want it to). What I miss is the Option to add new users in the “manage users” tab. When you have forum just for a specific group, like lets say when you work on a commercial project and need a forum for that, you don´t want to say “register here”, you want to send login-data to people. But now, let´s post something :D

Posting.. well.. Posts:

In the options i could decide which editor should be used for posting. i chose the default WordPress Tiny MCE Editor, which is accessible from the front end here. When creating a topic, i realised that this plugin was not meant for themes with a small content area. The Editor (with transparent background) actually flew over the sidebar, which i found disturbing. I think it would be nice if there were 2 page templates included in the plugin that you could choose in the options if you want the sidebar of your blog displayed in the forum area, because i think most people don´t want/need that and it just looks stupid if the editor is wider than the forum itself. Of course, one could choose a wider layout, but if you are installing this forum not on a new site, you probably don´t want to do that. Aside from that, posting is easy and works fine.

Customizing the Look:

There are 9 skins to choose from. They are all pretty standard, nothing too fancy, but solid. Just like a forum should look. Theming works over css files, which makes it pretty easy to customize the look of your forum and also makes it very hard to break something. It´s also easy for people with little coding knowledge, since the files are built logical and have every option in a new line (yes, that´s how i want my css). If you create an own skin, just upload it in the styles/skins folder and you will have the option to choose it under the style tab in your “Manage Options” Menu. If you are new to customizing you can just replace hexcodes in the css of an existing skin and substitute the images in the specific folder.  I´m pretty sure that your skin won´t be overwritten when you update the plugin. If they do it like that, i would suggest that they give users the option to not overwrite those files (sorry, too lazy to install an old version and test it now lol).

Conclusion:

I was pretty wrong with believing this plugin could be senseless when i looked at their site. It´s actually the best forum plugin i know, very elaborate and with some more functionality it could also be an alternative to full blown forum software like phpbb. It beats bbPress in almost every discipline. It´s really a small masterpiece and I will suggest it to anyone who wants to start a forum on his WordPress powered site. The Code is mostly clean and commented and i really like all the ajax stuff they added. Unfortunately it has no import function to migrate existing forums and their users, that´s why it´s probably not interesting to people who are already running a successful forum. I am not sure if they did this within the last days, but things that the weblogtoolscollection review suggested as improvements are already there, like a detailed installation instruction with screenshots. After the frustrating experiences with bbPress and other Forum-Plugins, testing this one was a very nice experience. Alex Staines and Steve Klasen, who are the authors of that plugin really thought about almost everything and i´m sure with enough input from the community, this plugin will get even better in the future.

Pictures:

 

Download:

If you are looking for a great forum plugin for your WordPress Site, go to their download page , download it and have some fun : )