How to Turn WordPress Comments into a Forum

Comment on SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin by SEO Dave.

I’ve worked with a few forum scripts like PHPBB and understand what you mean by a wide forum look.

In Stallion 6.1 (still working on the update) I’ve added a no sidebar version that looks more forum like than the other Stallion layouts.

This is a test site #### running unfinished Stallion 6.1 and the WPRobot autoblog plugin for quick content.

Changed it to the no sidebars layout. Still has sidebars, but they are all at the bottom. The layout of the site took no code changes, so all built into Stallion 6.1.

All the content is automated, but a post like ##### gives a forum like look.

From a forum perspective the standard WordPress comment threading works well, the SEO Super Comments pages works very well with search engines as long as the Comment titles are SEO’d (which the site owner can edit at anytime).

What’s lacking is the ability for a visitor to start their own forum topics, the comment content is limited to what the posts the site owner has made is about. A partial fix to this would be to create starter posts that are general, so a post called “WordPress Forum” for example with a small amount of content explaining it’s a ‘forum’ about WordPress could be used for all comments related to WordPress. Like all forums there’s only so many posts that are at the top of a particular forum, so no difference there. So if you built a site with say 20 starter posts (equivalent to 20 forum sections) it could be grown like a forum.

What might pull it together is on the SEO Super Comments pages comments made in response to that comment is shown on the SEO Super Comments page. Example is this forum post SEO Consultant Tips has one response and it’s shown on that page below it. This SEO Super Comment ##### has one response, but it’s not show on that page.

If I can get the Stallion SEO Super Comments pages to show the response comments (I can get the entire comments for the original post to show) with the reply to link to each of the comments shown that would be a lot more like a forum without the need for registrations etc… From an SEO perspective that would be better than most forum scripts since most forums don’t show the individual comments (forum posts) on separate pages, forums like PHPBB have the forum topic page like the SEO Consultant Tips page and all replies are on that page: there’s not a lot of SEO value in having forum topics on one page with no replies compared to one page with 20 replies since it’s still only one page indexed (even a topic with enough replies to create page 2+ has little extra SEO value since they have the same title).

David

Update: test site no longer live, see this website for how the above works and where I went with the SEO super comments features to create min-forums within a WordPress blog.