SimplePress, FYI

Something to keep in mind when considering SimplePress, yes you can attach files to your forums posts but if your community is likely to attach large collections of photos to their posts, there is no way to browse those file collections. Users must click, view, and close each file individually. We just migrated a new but busy forum to SimplePress but overlooked this very important feature.

As I understand it, SimplePress does not use the WP media storage system so media files that are uploaded into SimplePress cannot be displayed via WP or WP plugins (Like NextGEN Gallery). Since there is no advanced photo viewer available for SimplePress, your community of users will be out of luck and won’t come back since nobody will sort through 100 thumbnails one at a time.

I’m ok with paying for SimplePress forum access, it’s just their way of collecting money to offset their time commitment. If I’m in business for 10 years it’ll amount to $1000. This is a major shortcoming though that I didn’t see anyone else mention and we wouldn’t have gone with SimplePress if we had known about it ahead of time. so far, SP forum support has been mostly helpful and the software has been working well.

Thanks for reading.
Bart