[@gswaim Participant 15 years, 8 months ago]

@ricardouk

I share many of your concerns. I too have stumbled onto the Mingle Forum plug-in.

I have it installed along with the Mingle plug-in. This turns a WordPress site into a BuddyPress-like site with an extremely short learning curve. I had both installed, tweaked on the code to remove a couple of links that I didn’t want, modified the CSS to make a near perfect style match to my theme, and understood how to configure administrate the forum in about 3 hours.

I am not a code monkey and cannot compare the pros and cons of how Mingle Forums stacks up against the bbPress plug-in or any other solutions. The security vulnerability has also been resoled to my satisfaction.

Before I implement a solution I am more concerned with its support and sustainability. Both plug-ins have have over 50,000 downloads and the Mingle Forum plug-in was last updated 20 days ago. I had one problem/question with the installation and it was answered by the plug-in’s author within hours. Within the last 5 days the Mingle Forum’s author has posted 5 videos instructional videos on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/cartpauj). All indications are that this project is alive and well.

I am going to go live with it this week and plan to use it until another plug-in solution, which is better, becomes available.