Hi. I'm pretty new to Hubspot and we use it to provide a User Community area where we can share information on events and other resources. Our clients would like us to create a new user forum where they can share ideas and ask direct questions of each other. Does anyone have experience of doing this that you'd be willing to share - in terms of what software to use, how to set up the forum etc? Thanks
There's a lot out there. For instance, this Hubspot forum runs on Lithium (now part of Khoros). But there are other community forum solutions. I would start with a few questions to answer before you start looking:
- Do you want to host it yourself or have it hosted for you?
- If hosting yourself what server technologies (PHP/etc)?
- Do you need to integrate with anything (other logins/etc)?
I would look into those solutions a bit more as that article is originally from Mar-2021 and is starting to show its age. BBPress for WP that it is recommended is not compatible with the latest version of Wordpress (6) and the fact that it still has PHP 5.6 as a minimum requirement would make me question the security of the code base itself ( https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbpress/ ). There are even questions on the bbpress page forum that debate whether the solution is still actively maintained. This tends to be one of the problems with free plugins in the Wordpress world. They may be great while the community actively maintains them but over time if that interest wanes, then the plugin becomes more of a risk.
If you have a Wordpress installation, then it can be assumed that you have PHP and mySQL databases so some of the other solutions mentioned like Vanilla or Invision (which also have hosted versions) come into play. Given that you want something easy to manage, then you are probably looking to their hosted solutions vs. a self-hosted solution. However the complexity you are going to face is integrating into Hubspot. What exactly are you looking for there? Placing a tracking script on those solutions is rather easy, but doing anything more than that would likely require some sort of Zapier plugin or custom development.
There's a lot out there. For instance, this Hubspot forum runs on Lithium (now part of Khoros). But there are other community forum solutions. I would start with a few questions to answer before you start looking:
- Do you want to host it yourself or have it hosted for you?
- If hosting yourself what server technologies (PHP/etc)?
- Do you need to integrate with anything (other logins/etc)?
Thanks Ben. I think my answers will display my lack of knowledge in this area ...
We could host it ourselves if there was a particular domain to host. That would be with AWS but we'd probably need help with that. We found this Hubspot blogpost online and thought that the WordPress plugin would seem to be a good approach because we are familiar with WordPress as our website is hosted using WP. Another option is that we just link out to software that offers us the necessary forum functionality - ability for clients to post, reply etc, for us to tag and group conversations, to search and to feature them on our main user community online area. I think that we need something that is very easy to do from our perspective, but which integrates with Hubspot. Users do have to login to the community online area - currently a shared login, but we're looking to make that individual.
Not sure this answers your questions, but it probably gives you more of an idea where we're at.
I would look into those solutions a bit more as that article is originally from Mar-2021 and is starting to show its age. BBPress for WP that it is recommended is not compatible with the latest version of Wordpress (6) and the fact that it still has PHP 5.6 as a minimum requirement would make me question the security of the code base itself ( https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbpress/ ). There are even questions on the bbpress page forum that debate whether the solution is still actively maintained. This tends to be one of the problems with free plugins in the Wordpress world. They may be great while the community actively maintains them but over time if that interest wanes, then the plugin becomes more of a risk.
If you have a Wordpress installation, then it can be assumed that you have PHP and mySQL databases so some of the other solutions mentioned like Vanilla or Invision (which also have hosted versions) come into play. Given that you want something easy to manage, then you are probably looking to their hosted solutions vs. a self-hosted solution. However the complexity you are going to face is integrating into Hubspot. What exactly are you looking for there? Placing a tracking script on those solutions is rather easy, but doing anything more than that would likely require some sort of Zapier plugin or custom development.
Thank you again Ben. What is becoming clearer as we have our conversations is that this is more complex than I have the skills for. We are going to consider an alternative approach which doesn't require integration but which we can link to. Thank you so much for helping us to reach that solution. Have a good day.
