My recent move to TXP created a need for an alternative way to offer theme support rather than in the sites comments. I think the forums will fulfill this need for now. General discussions on improving the themes, WordPress and web design and development are also welcome.

The forums should serve as a more appropriate support tool. They will be there regardless of what happens with comments, CMS or any other changes to this site. The forum also has search and tagging functionality that the comments didn’t.

In addition, I have enabled a few features to hopefully make the user experience better:

1. The Support Forum Module allows the users and administrators to assign a status to a support request.
2. Users can enable email notification on replies to topics that have been added to the favorites.
3. Gravatars are also supported with your registered email address.

I have started some topics on frequently asked questions and some open discussions on possible theme enhancements. Please let me know if you guys have any suggestions in the comments below or in the forums.

So far I have looked over bbPress, PunBB, Vanilla and Simple Machines Forum (SMF).

The requirements for the forum software:

• Easy to use (for admin and users)
• Easy to theme or style
• Search capabilities
• Easily integrates with CMS solution (TXP, WP, etc.)
• Clean URLs would be a plus

PunBB seems to have a lot of features and I have seen a lot of people I respect using it. I have only tried a demo of SMF, but I have heard some good things about it. Vanilla seems fairly simple. However, I have heard the Vanilla template engine is kind of a pain to work with. I honestly wanted to use bbPress, just because of its ties with WordPress. Can you tell I am frustrated by the rambling?

Has anyone built or used a forum and have any suggestions on which forum software to use? Any opinions or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.