The best WordPress community plugins aren’t those that only cater to the basic requisites. The purpose of having such features is to facilitate conversations, to allow people to come together, get engaged in discussions and to facilitate the growth and retention of the community. There are far too many generic forums and discussion platforms that don’t have much relevance. As you pick some WordPress community plugins to engage with your target audience and to keep them hooked, do work on some content and ideas that would keep the community enticed. Here are some of the finest WordPress community plugins.
1. Users Ultra
Users Ultra is for every website that needs social media integration. And any community, blog, forum or discussion platform is incomplete today without real time sync with social media platforms. Users Ultra can connect blogs and forums with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Yahoo among others. There is a free version which comes with sufficient features but if you want a whole spectrum of goodies then you may consider the premium version of Users Ultra.
2. BadgeOS Community Add-on
The primary purpose of this plug-in or add-on is simple. You reward community members with badges in due recognition of their activity or contribution to the community. It could be due to some unprecedented contribution or just some regular activity. How you choose to reward your community members is your prerogative but having a way to show appreciation or to recognize is always going to be effective. This plugin can record all kinds of activities from activating an account, to tracking profile updates or change of avatar, social actions which would include everything from initiating a share to sending a friendship request and the plugin caters to all the basics of a community plugin, from creating a group to managing it through administrators and moderators.
3. Vanilla Forums
This plugin is used presently by more than a hundred thousand websites and thus it has a thing or two that other WordPress community plugins don’t have. At the onset, you would find this plugin good enough for embedded forums, blog comments, single sign-in feature and a few widgets. As you continue to use this plugin, you would be amazed with the blog commenting system, the integration of commenting tools including livefyre and disqus, compatibility with diverse themes, forum widgets, managing of the forum from within WordPress panel and many more features.
