There is no WordPress plugin to touch it, and the alternatives are simply too cumbersome to integrate.

For most needs, Simple:Press forum provides all that you need, but I’ve also mentioned before that it is not as simple to administer as some – but only because it has a wealth of options. And under the lid, tweaking the code is not particularly easy – again because there is so much included that it can be hard to find exactly what you want to change.

Mechanics aside, I have been trying for months to develop a simpler alternative built on posts and comments. This is not the most difficult coding challenge, but it is time-consuming, and there always seems something more important to do. Whilst doing the more important things, I noticed that Pods CMS has recently changed there forum for a completely different, simpler interface.

Looking deeper, I saw that it was based on Stack Overflow. Similar, in some ways, to Yahoo Answers, this approach means that we can focus on answering questions. This is a bit of an eye-opener for me, and I realize that promoting a forum to answer questions and share experiences and opinions is asking too much for one application.

I’ve decided to split my forum into a Question And Answer Section and a Discussion Forum. In an ideal world, these would be linked, and it would be absolutely possible to build such a beast with Pods CMS. But the time to build this from scratch means I’d rather look for something usable now, and seek better integration later.

The key here is to find something usable that is easily integrated into WordPress.

Step forward Question2Answer.

I’ve installed it on own of my sites, and I’ll report back on the details later. I’ve no intention to import questions from Simple:Press Forum, as I believe the two applications can work side by side. There will probably be a few more integration issues, but installation of Question2Answer using the WordPress user records was surprisingly easy.

Rather than repeat it here, I’ll refer you to my Question2Answer WordPress installation notes on the author’s support site.

Hundreds of you have asked for more information about adding advertising to your forums, or more specifically about adding AdSense to Simple:Press.

I’d like to say “don’t bother!” but I think you deserve more than that.

Why “don’t bother?” Because forums are notoriously hard to monetize, though there are a couple of ways to get reasonable results.

Before I explain those, I’d like to look at some of the ways to add AdSense to Simple:Press forums. I mention AdSense, but of course any advertising scheme can be added in the same way.

Easy Ways To Add AdSense To Simple:Press

❶ Sidebar

It is usually better to disable sidebars on pages, so this option is a poor one. Also Sidebar click-thru rates are usually pretty poor, but this is an easy option – just paste your code into a text widget.

❷ Footer

Edit footer.php in your theme, or add one of the many plugins that let you drop code into your footer.

❸ Other Theme Files

You could edit the page template, or other files, but I cannot see the point.

❹ Forum Page

Simple:Press creates a blank page, usually called forum, though you should normally change this to your-site-topic-forum. You should enter some introductory text on this page, and it is also the best place to easily add AdSense code. If you wrap your text in <div id="sforum"><div class="sfloginstrip"> Your text & AdSense code <\div><\div>, the text will pick up your Simple:Press skin styling. You can also use div to wrap position styling round your AdSense code. If you do this, be sure to test thoroughly on forum lists, forum details, etc to make sure it is positioned OK on every type of forum page.

Harder Ways To Add AdSense To Simple:Press

№𝟙 Enzyme Descriptions

As previously mentioned.

№𝟚 Edit Simple:Press Files

This gives you the most flexibility, but be careful to thoroughly document your amendments, as you will have to reapply them if you upgrade. Also, change the description in sf-control.php to add a link to your documentation, as a reminder on the plugins admin page.

There are lots of options for placing your adverts. Simple:Press has many files, so finding the exact point can occasionally be difficult. However the Simple:Press support forum is second to none, so if you need to know exactly which file to edit for a particular location, ask in their forum. To start you off, I have placed advertising easily just above the statistics block. Simply edit forum/sf-pagecomponents.php, and search for function sf_render_stats(). Paste your code immediately after the { and your advert will appear above the statistics. As the statistics block outputs an HTML table, you have many other options for exactly where you position your code.

Getting AdSense Revenue From Simple:Press

As I said at the beginning, forums are notoriously difficult to monetize, but there are some things you can do to get a little reward for your efforts. It goes without saying, that unless you are super-responsive in your forum, you will struggle to get traffic. Traffic building using the forum needs to be a separate topic, but one solid tip is to answer every question as best you can, then ask a follow-up question to encourage further debate.

Some worthwhile ways to monetize that traffic are:-

⑴ Don’t Bother

Oh No, not that one again! I actually mean: don’t focus on earning directly in your forum, focus on reference and summary pages outside your forum, or blog posts, that show high eCPM. Look at the AdSense earnings in your Google Analytics summary, and sort it in descending eCPM order (hint: add it to your Dashboard now, then you can see the highest performing pages easily). In the forum, ensure that your answers direct readers to your top performers. Their are refinements to identifying the best targets, and I’ll cover this another time.

You can take this a stage further, by using the techniques I listed for adding AdSense code, to add your own adverts for your top performing pages.

⑵ Use Adsense For Feeds

This needs a full article in it’s own right. Encourage me to do one by commenting below – but try to be creative, not just “I want it”. If you can’t wait, just put your “all forums” feed through FeedBurner, then market your monetized feed. It’s never a great earner, but it’s easy, and worth the minimal effort.

⑶ Use AdSense For Search

Again, this merits its own complete article. Basically, you switch off the Simple:Press search in the options, and setup a custom search engine for your site(s). Using the techniques listed above for adding code to your forum, add your own monetized search forms, being careful not to exceed the AdSense maximum. Then promote your search engine – in my experience a very good earner!

Mad with admiration one minute, mad with frustration the next.

It’s like breaking your leg when you jump around to celebrate a lottery win. Fantastic find – frustrating failings.

Let me say first, that so far, I believe the potential of this plugin is tremendous. I’m just letting off a bit of steam here because the excitement of finding a truly great WordPress plugin is making me emotional about the rough edges. I am certain those rough edges can be easily smoothed. The proof of the pudding will come in a day or so, when I complete my replacement toolbar.

The developers describe it as:

WordPress evolved.
Pods is a CMS framework for WordPress.
It’s a plugin that sits on top of WordPress, allowing you to add and display your own content types.

I see it as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool that could change the way we look at plugins.

Why am I so pleased with this gem?

For months, I have been looking for an easy way to work with extra data tagged onto WordPress. With a background in relational database planning and management, it is frustrating to have to workround things like usermeta & WordPress options. Also, I like simple but comprehensive forms to manage linked data, and it is daunting to have to code a relational database application to integrate with WordPress.

I can see that it can be done. Simple:Press forum is a prime example of integrating a rich database application into WordPress, but it has a scary amount of code and complex field relationships, with little in the way of generic routines that can be adapted for other applications.

Other tools I have seen, only allow simple flat file manipulation, and would need a lot of adapting to tackle relationships. Enter Pods – an easy way to add relational tables as separate applications, or linked into WordPress users or posts. Amazing potential, and amazingly easy to use.

So what are the problems?

Not much if you are familiar with coding, and do not mind getting your hands dirty.

• The user guide is very poor in examples, and I suspect some of it is out of date, as the plugin is still on a steep development curve.
• The forum, and the guide, have been radically pruned recently, so just as you think you have found an answer to something – click – 404 not found!
• Pods has a great way of attaching code to fields called helpers, but the names of these have been changed in the latest release, so many of the example packages do not work. However, it is very easy to find and replace on these, so very easy to fix – I’m just surprised it should be necessary.

So that’s a very brief introduction to Pods. I’ll go and finish the toolbar, then go through some code over the next few posts to show you just how easy it is to build an application. Early days yet, but I think this might be the answer to my nightmare about the lack of good, well-structured example plugins.

A drastic measure, but a timely one.

Don’t be misled – it is a fantastic plugin. In fact more than a plugin, it is a very special application. But sometimes, you have to take a hard decision to ensure you efficiently fulfil your purpose.

Community websites are the best way to explore, expand, and exploit your web business opportunities. A forum emphasizes that sense of community, so am I mad to get rid of it?

To understand, you need to be clear about the purpose of your forum, and clear about your alternatives.

I chose the forum route because I was unhappy with the limitations of commenting. My research told me that Simple:Press Forum was the best option for a WordPress site. However, I did not want to stop WordPress comments as they are popular with many people.

Moderating comments and a forum becomes tedious as conversations become fragmented and spam control is totally different. Keeping web pages “on-topic” with a clear keyword driven focus is as important to visitors as it is to search engines, and having two separate conversation streams makes that focus difficult.

Though the Simple:Press forum offers excellent member management, none of my sites is a true membership site. I encourage contributors to maintain good debates, but membership really equates simply to access rights. In my case, these are simple – visitors either contribute, or they read.

Despite it’s name, Simple:Press is quite complicated. Both from it’s extensive feature list, and ‘under the hood’ it is far from simple.

I realized I could get what I need by enhancing WordPress comments, plus a few other tweaks. I will describe these in more detail later.

For now, it’s goodbye Simple:Press. Nice knowing ya, and when I need a membership site, I know where to look.

Is that enough for me?

Oh, no! I have to push just that little bit further.

It started some time ago, when I wanted to include a hyperlink in a forum description. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the HTML held up fine in the forum, and links, bold text and other markups were easy to add.

I was less happy when I went back to the Admin pages to make other changes – the HTML screwed up the Admin display, and could not be edited. However, it could easily be re-typed, or edited directly in the database through phpMyAdmin, so, I left things as they were. For a while.

I was tempted to raise this with the support guys at Simple:Press. They have always been extremely responsive, and their own forum is a fine example of the best in technical support. However, a new version was in the late stages of the release process, so I thought I would wait until after it’s release.

A few days later, I had the bright idea of including some AdSense in the description. I was certain that the Simple:Press forum description was no match for the AdSense javascript code. However, I remembered how I had used the Enzymes plugin in the past to make adding AdSense code to posts very easy.

WordPress Enzymes Plugin

This is a fascinating plugin that allows so many ways of manipulating your content that it deserves (and probably needs) a series of articles to do it justice.

In it’s very simple form, it allows you to store data in standard WordPress Custom Fields and refer to them wherever you want.

I’ll cover Enzymes in more detail later. For the forum description, all you need to do is to store the HTML for your description in a Custom Field, and it is easy to display, and easy to edit.

Simple:Press Forum Description Enhancement

As the forum installs it’s own WordPress page, this is the ideal spot to store the HTML code for the description. If you are not too good at typing in HTML direct, then use the normal WYSIWYG page editor, click the HTML tab, then copy the code into an appropriately named Custom Field. Enzymes can use multiword field names, but I find it much easier to use a simple field name like ForumNameDesc.

On this site I might have FormDesc and FunctionDesc, but almost anything goes. For the moment, I am using plain text descriptions for the forum on this site, so let me show you a real world example using a site I set up this week.

In this case, I wanted an image in the description. This is a group description, but the procedure works exactly the same for a forum description.

With the image uploaded to your site (or the URL to another location), you first edit the forum page, adding a custom field.

WordPress Custom Field

Then, in the forums settings use the Enzymes reference code:

Simple:Press Forum Description

The finished result shows the image in all it’s glory:

Ian Dury Forum

So that is how easy it is to enhance Simple:Press forum descriptions with images, AdSense, or any other fancy formatting you like.

Just one more thing before I finish…

Final Simple:Press Forum Enhancement

You may have noticed that there is a heading to the forum. This is nothing unusual – Simple:Press forum output is shown on a normal WordPress page, and you can precede it with whatever introductory text you like. Normally, this will include styling from your site theme, but on the forum page, you can borrow styling from the Simple:Press skin. On that page, I used the following code:

Simple:Press Skinned Forum Page Header

If you have any questions about these, or any other, WordPress plugins, please use the comment box below.