Thanks for the prompt reply. Easy editing of the slug is an important tool for administrators, so it will be a relief to see that feature in place.
The forum design is very nice indeed, I have installed it our family tree site - http://kemp.directory/community/ and it works perfectly within our design theme.
Honestly, what you have done in a short space of time is FAR more impressive than bbPress has achieved in years! (A few months ago, I migrated a bbPress site with 15,000 Topics to Xenforo because members disliked it so much.)
The other feature you should consider is integration with the All In One SEO Pack, that would be very helpful from an overall SEO perspective.
Be very cautious about Yoast SEO though - in the bbPress environment, it automatically adds "noindex" to 2nd and subsequent pages of Replies! In our case, after moving from vBulletin 4.x to bbPress, we lost almost 50,000 pages of content from Google's index!
Kind regards
Ben
Thank you WRC Co!
The other feature you should consider is integration with the All In One SEO Pack, that would be very helpful from an overall SEO perspective.
wpForo comes with built-in intuitive and auto-meta generating unctions. It works well on most of websites even with Yoast SEO and All in one SEO Pack. For example on our website we use Yoast SEO and here is the result of meta data:
Yoast SEO and other SEO plugins work well on other parts of WordPress, but the forum part is being replaced with wpForo SEO which is more intuitive and complete. Yoast SEO and other SEO plugins doesn't have appropriate functions to generate forum meta data. They only work well with bbPress, because bbPress forums/topics/posts are simple posts, they are being stored and rendered as a simple post with custom post type. But wpForo database architecture is close to professional forum boards, it has own tables and entries. It's developed and designed like stand-alone pro forum to be able store and perform forums with any database size.
The only issue is in very few cases Yoast SEO and other SEO plugins overwrite wpForo SEO without proper meta data. We tested and found this comes from themes. We're working to make wpForo SEO more solid.
If you don't see wpForo SEO (like on screenshot above) in forum page source, it means the SEO plugin you use has overwritten it, this is a conflict and we hope the future release will solve this issue.
Hi Robert
Thanks for the detailed explanation. In our case, the Forums will be a subsidiary function, not the primary reason for the site's operation. We must use All In One SEO Pack or Yoast SEO to provide SEO functionality within the main WordPress site, where the focus is the Genealogy / Family Tree section.
So, the intent in running our forum is to provide an integrated discussion platform as an integrated part of a much bigger the picture. I'm sure some Forums do start off as standalone entities, but in many cases they will underpin the main content, not contain it.
My forum does show the WP Foro data as per your illustration, but also includes a block from the All In One SEO Pack - with only the rel=canonical section. See attached file;
That I can live with, but it would also be nice if it was possible to manually edit meta Titles and Descriptions - as a profession SEO consultant (TheSEOguy.co.nz) for 19 years, I confess that I am obsessed by having manual control over all elements. 🙂
Problem: I've just noticed that the <Title> tag does not have the correct output for the Topic pages e.g.;
- http://kemp.directory/community/new-member-guide/genealogy-adding-new-members/
But the Title is coming up as: <title>Forum | Kemp Family Tree</title>
- http://kemp.directory/community/new-member-guide/forum-rules/
Also the wrong Title: <title>Forum | Kemp Family Tree</title>
As I am sure you know, the Title is still one of the most important factors on a page when it comes to rankings, and the last thing you would want is Duplicate Titles across all forum pages...
I can see that in your own forum, that issue is not happening, so it may be a theme issue? We are using the Goodnews theme from Themeforest.
Kind regards
Ben