Web Forums are an effective medium of building online communities. Joomla forum extensions are designed to integrate the features of a forum into Joomla based websites. These plugins are very helpful to give people a reason to come back on your website. But all the forum extensions would not perform like the way you want. That’s why we have hand-picked some of best Joomla Forum Extensions for you which will serve most of your business needs.
These Plugins have been around many years from now and they work flawlessly to get people hanging out and chatting for long periods of time on your websites. However, you should keep in mind that managing and running a forum successfully takes a lot of time and effort, but often the returns are encouraging in the long run.
No more talk, let’s check out 5 Best Joomla Forum extensions and their features in detail.
Note: We can integrate any of these Joomla Extensions on your Joomla website.
Best Forum Joomla Extensions
5 Best Joomla Forum extensions
Kunena
Integrating a forum into your Joomla website has always been possible but never been so easy. Because it often involves of using bridge extensions to connect the website to free-standing, well-established web-based forum products.
Over the days, Kunena has become the most popular Forum component for Joomla. Downloaded more than 8M times since inception. It is truly an open source and one and only community-driven discussion/support forum for Joomla. Kunena is well maintained, detailed documented, flexible and easy to use. It is absolutely free and does not require any previous experience to start work. We at JoomDev use Kunena to create a discussion forum on our Joomla Templates. So, you check our website to know how Kunena looks like.
My favorite features of Kunena:
- Multilingual: Kunena is multilingual and can translate most of the popular languages. So, language barrier would not be an issue to communicate with the people around the world.
- Documentation: This forum extension is well documented. You will understand each and every line with colorful graphics.
- Installation: You don’t need to watch a youtube video or call your friends to install Kunena. Easy installation process would bring you smile on your face.
EasyDiscuss
Thanks to Stakeideas for bringing this amazing forum extension. It is one of the popular discussion forums and a number of downloading is shooting higher over the years. Whether you want to have a private or public discussion, this Joomla component is really a powerful one with lots of unmatched features.
Let’s go into detail about the features:
- Versatile: You can easily set EasyDiscuss to work like a discussion area, forum or a help desk. Any of these functionalities can be chosen as per your necessity.
- Shared Logins: We sometimes need to put a question or reply to someone’s comment, EasyDiscuss made it easy for you. Users can quickly login using just a single account from either JomSocial, Community and more.
- Multi Interactions: Add some classes into discussions with likes, polls, star rating, badges and see how a normal discussion turn into a crispy conversation.
- Real-Time updates: With Easy Discussion, you can stay updated with latest posts while getting email alerts at regular interval.
- Prioritizing Ticket: Sometimes we lost completely with the support request and bug report. Prioritizing Ticket will allow us to prioritize and filter our tasks better.
- Better Reporting: Now you can get better insights of what is going on inside the discussion forum. This will help you to monitor forum deeply.
- Supports multiple attachments: This Joomla Discussion Component supports multiple attachments such as PDFs, images or Zipped folders which you can include in your discussions.
Besides my favorites, there is lot more feature that makes EasyDiscuss the absolutely best forum and support software for Joomla. If you ever need a question answer or forum extension for Joomla, EasyDiscuss is the answer.
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ChronoForums
ChronoForums is an all in one Joomla Forum Extension made for versatile needs. It is very simple with lots of amazing features. Features like private content, permission control, the responsive interface made it extremely powerful. If you feel to send a private message to anyone in this forum, you can easily do that.
With ChronoForums, you don’t need to think about loading time of the pages as most of its features use AJAX in order to perform tasks with minimum server load.
Key features of ChronoForums:
- Support for nested forums.
- Search by relevance
- Posts topics and reporting manual activation by admins.
- Attach any file while posting
- List your favorite post.
- List all the featured topics
- Vote to the reputed users.
- Support private messages.
- Global and distinct forums permissions.
- Extended new topic form fields.
- Subscription to a particular topic is possible.
- Get notified by emails.
- Support for one Theme/Styles available.
- Strong moderation tools.
- Reply to your favorite posts directly by email (IMAP required).
- Support Bootstrap theme.
- Data migration tool for phpBB bridged forums and Kunena to ChronoForums is provided.
- Multi-language support
CjForum
The next forum extension in our list is CJ forums. It is not only a Joomla powerful forum tool but also a complete platform to discuss on a given topic. This extension is pretty good but comes with a price.
Investing $60 for this extension would be worthy. However, you don’t just need to simply take my words, but give it a try today. Then you will realize how handy this forum extension is!
Most Striking Features:
- This forum extension is 100% responsive works equally on every viewing device.
- It supports unlimited nested categories, with this you can manage your contents more conveniently.
- Ranking system allows you to assign a rank to the users and encourage them to write more.
- You can rewards the users with the built-in points system.
- With the use of LeaderBoard, you can easily display user ranking and ask them to participate on any particular topic.
- Most useful likes and dislikes are included in this Joomla extension. You can like/dislike on any topic or replies.
Cobalt
Cobalt is one of the oldest and widely used Joomla Forum extensions available in the market which can handle any number of audience.
It is most suited for forum, blog and support desk ticketing system to provide support and can also be used for small collaborative teams looking for a platform where multiple discussions can easily be read and searched.
Cobalt can easily be expanded and modified. Plenty of third-party modifications and add-ons are available for free using multiple Cobalt user groups and resources. It has the huge number of an active user community, and they produce many third-party tools to extend cobalt functionality.
Features of Cobalt
- Modern Notification System allows you to get a notification like Facebook or iPhone.
- Advance search and filtering system give you the flexibility to search by field values.
- Different kinds of fields like images, text, HTML, multi-select has been provided with flexible editing options.
- The user can create the personal homepage and with their own choice of categories.
- Modern Administrative Control Panel
- It is rated one of the fastest loading Joomla Forum Extension.
- You can easily set a moderation to any section and adjust his permissions.
- Extensive useful Tools
- You can seamlessly integrate cobalt with EasySocial.
- You can also choose user that you wish to follow.
