Frequently Asked Questions

I’ve installed the plugin – now what?

Now that you have installed your forums read our getting started pages.

I don’t receive e-mail notifications

There are several factors that can influence e-mail notifications delivery. The best thing you can do to diagnose email delivery issues is to install a plugin that shows you an email log. We recommend MAILGUN or SMTP POST. The logs will let you know if emails are being generated and not delivered or just not being generated at all.

I can’t seem to create a new forum. When I select a FORUM GROUP in which to create the forum, nothing happens.
Use your CTRL-F5 key to refresh your browser cache for that page. Sometimes old CSS and JS scripts just needs to be cleared out and CTRL-F5 does that.

Can I import data from my old forum?
Yes! You can import data into our forum from other forums including bbPress, Asgaros and others. Get the importer here;

With a bit of development skill you can even build your own importer for something we don’t already have!
Or contact us to build one for you or to use our flat-fee import data service.

I am a WordPress admin but I can’t see Forum menu items
When a new WordPress administrator is created by another WordPress admin, the new WP Admin is NOT automatically granted rights to the forum. Instead, an existing forum admin needs to explicitly grant the new WP ADMIN forum privileges under the FORUM->ADMINS menu option.

One of the nice consequences of this division of security is that you can make a user a Forum Admin without making them a WordPress admin.

Upon installation, existing WP admins are made Forum admins; so this issue will only present itself when a new WP admin is created after the forum is installed.

What shortcodes are available?
Simple:Press does not use short-codes. Instead, it outputs the entire forum directly into the content area of the WordPress page you specify. By default that page is called FORUM but you can easily switch it to a different page in FORUM->INTEGRATION->PAGE AND PERMALLINKS.

Why is the forum so thin?
Many themes use a sidebar on their default WordPress pages. This reduces the content area that the forum is allowed to use.

Additionally, themes might designate a content area of only x% of the width of the screen.

These two practices are the primary reasons why the forum might not look the way it should.

However, the good news is that many of the higher quality themes provide a “full width” page template or allow you to change the default content area width of pages. Contact your theme developer to find out if they have either of these two options.

Can I charge for forum access?
There is no option in the Forums Plugin to charge for a membership or access to forums. But our Simple:Press Member Subscriptions plugin can help with that. It collects payments for memberships and includes options for integration with Simple:Press Forums.

Additionally, all the other reputable membership plugins use WordPress ROLES to control their membership. Simple:Press forums does too. So you can use ROLES to integrate with most other membership plugins if you like. Just contact us if you need more help understanding what this means.

Can I upload files to posts?
The free version of the plugin does not allow file uploads. But the premium version does. The premium version also allow users to list, view and delete their prior file uploads.

The free version of the plugin can still display images that are stored elsewhere – just paste the link to the image into the post editor.

The editor looks barebones – is there a better one?
The editor in the free version is a pure text editor. However, the premium version of Simple:Press comes with a full wysiwyg editor – the same one that WordPress uses – TinyMCE.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by nigel01. Reason: Minor formatting issue