5 features for using bbPress for support forums

One of the main uses for any forum software is to provide support and for users to discuss features, ask for help, and more. But, there are many things that bbPress lacks to be considered a full-fledged solution for support use.

But, with some additional plugins, you can easily expand bbPress forums and make them usable for providing support.

Content Bulk Edit

Maintaining the forums with a lot of activity can be a slow process when you have to do it on topic by topic basis. But, there is a way to implement bulk editing for both topics and forums, with the use of GD Forum Manager for bbPress. With this feature, you can easily improve the management of forum content. And the plugin can be expanded with additional options to add to the editor.

Bulk Edit is implemented with the GD Forum Manager for bbPress plugin, with the support for single topic/forum editing from any list or bulk topic/forum editing. This is a free plugin available from WordPress.org.

Topic Prefixes

While the bbPress supports topic tags for categorizing topics, that feature lacks the focus to be useful for the proper organization of topics. But, with the topic prefixes implemented through the GD Topic Prefix Pro plugin, you have full control over the list of prefixes, creation of one or more prefix groups (allowing setting 2 or more prefixes for each topic), settings colors, easy-to-use integration for editing and more.

Prefixes make the topics easier to find among the other topics inside the forums, and the plugin also supports bulk editing implemented with the GD Forum Manager for bbPress.

Topic Prefixes are implemented with the GD Topic Prefix Pro for bbPress plugin. It includes support for adding multiple groups for prefixes, controls over the rules for integration into forums, widgets for listing prefixes, filtering of topics, and more.

Canned Replies

With the busy support forum, it is often the case of getting very similar types of questions, that will always have the same answer. And, you usually can keep the list of predefined answers you can copy and paste into the reply. But, there is a much easier way to handle that by using the Canned Replies feature that allows you to define full replies with optional categories, show the list of replies in the reply form, and with the click on reply, add this predefined reply into reply content editor.

Canned Replies is a feature implemented with the GD bbPress Toolbox Pro plugin, allowing the creation of multiple canned replies with categories and integrating the list inside the reply form.

Forums and Topics Notices

Very often, you will need to show additional information or notice in some of the forums, or even individual topics or forums-wide, to inform your users about changes or offers. Having the notices styled differently, using different colors or even custom styling, can help draw attention to the notices and make them easier to use.

Forum and Topics Notices are implemented with the GD Forum Notices Pro for bbPress plugin, with the ability to create as many notices as you want, set advanced visibility rules (where to display the notice, to whom, and for how long), and control the display styling with the wide selection of layouts to choose from.

Private Topics and Replies

One of the main abilities of forum users is to create private topics or private replies to share the information with the website keymasters or moderators. These topics and replies need to be hidden from regular users when it comes to searches, feeds, or other methods that list the content.

Private Topics and Replies are the features implemented with the GD bbPress Toolbox Pro plugin, allowing the use of simple checkboxes in the topic and reply form to set the topic or reply as private. Private content can be seen by the author and forum keymasters, and moderators. Private content is color-coded and has an icon to mark it inside the topics or forums lists.