Media-ready WP forum

[adamohern]

Hi All:
I want to create a forum for my users, and I would like them to be able to post images as well.

The ideal solution would be to allow users to author posts within a certain category, just like I can. That way they could create really rich posts, and others could comment as desired. This solution is fantastic because it doesn’t require any external plugins…

except… that I can’t limit authors to post to a specific category. RoleScoper can do this, but it’s also a wicked complicated plugin.

So can anyone think of a way to easily create a forum within my WordPress 3 site that a) makes minimal use of plugins, and b) allows users to post media files?

Thanks!

[adamohern]

For example, one idea might be to create a multi-site network and use a second site as the forum. But this seems prohibitively complex. I really want something as simple as possible.