That's exactly how some people have done it. Kept comments closed and linked to the topic via the built in link.
AOC-Scott said:
… As for the original question … I would look into vbulletin. I think they are perhaps the most feature rich of the forums. They are also one of the more expensive. If you were able to link many blogs to a single forum it would strike me that that's your best hope. vbulletin does not however work as a plugin for WP it's more or less the otherway around. Not my cup of tea but there is a direction to go in.
Scott
Thanks Scott, A few months ago I google a conversation of someone promoting the same multi-blog/forum integration on V-Bulitin. http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=241504&page=3. He was as puzzled as I that no-one has done it yet.
This may not apply to you, but with my background, I've moved more toward Dot Net Nuke than WordPress. At a DNN conference in Tampa last month, I briefly spoke to someone at activemodules.com. He said that their Active Social module views forums as just another presentation of blogs so anything posted to one could be available to another depending on the queries behind each. I haven't investigated to see how well their software supports the rest of the integration discussed here, but it's probably the ideal data structure for it.
Bill
Swordfish, Thanks I will look into trying it that way. Sorry I didn't reply sooner, was off celebrating the rebellion. 
Elfman, I'm not actually looking to do the multiple blogs attached to a single forum thing, although; you did get me thinking about uses for it. Also, I'm a Unix admin by trade so the dot net stuff is way too complicated for me. 
I'll ask around a bit … post what I come up with. I know a bunch of people, with more money than I, that use vbulletin. I really like simple press as it's light weight and acts as a WP plugin. I see endless posibilities for simple press being the right tool for the job.
Scott
I asked and was answered, but didn’t formally make my request for a feature.
The answer was sound, however; I would like to request a look at the following.
Would it be possible to integrate the forum and the WP blog in such a way that there is not duplicate content? At least not in its entirety. Search engines will penalize for the duplicate content within a site, just as they penalize a site that has duplicate content from another site. Unfortunately search engines have no way of knowing who the original author is. This means that all publishers suffer the penalty. It seems like a simple request for the blog post content being somehow recursed into the forum. The other shoe that drops is the comments/forum content. This is not a bidirectional linkage at this point. I’m not sure if the forum content being placed in the blog comments is currently duplicated or not. However, duplicate content on a site is penalized regardless, as if it were on separate site.
I’m not sure how clear my request was. I hope I have not offended through unintentional criticism. I’m simply looking for more robust SEO and usability through a well integrated plug in.
Given time I really see this project gaining large main stream acceptance. The hard work and dedication is evident. If there is anything I can do to promote it further I will.
AOC-Scott
Blog post/topic linking is due for a complete review. Sadly we really had t concentrate on other issues and requirements for the forthcoming 4.1 but it is virtually top of the list for the next major update after that.
One of the best SEO tips I ever received, and still use to this day, is:
For the best Google Rank, do NOT focus on Google.
Google did not get where it is today, by being predictable. More than one report over the years has made big news in the SEO world, that Google has changed their ranking systems yet again.
What each report fails to point out is that Google changes their ranking algorythms EVERY DAY.
Build your site's content, crate a niche and draw your own following, submit to aggregator sites and other search engines but do not focus your life around Google.
If Google is going to punish your page rank because you have non-google ads, or if you produce a few landing pages with with excerpted content from the full content of your site, you will go crazy trying to adjust to every single nuance in their ranking system of the day.
If you really want the BEST SEO, use the tools available to you to create unique content, and display it in simple human readable form. If you have a niche site, be sure to learn all you can about your niche subject and present it in clear language. Illustrate it with your own photos (with photo tags and key word descriptions) and be sure to use no more than six or seven applicable key words in your dynamic headers.
Simple:Press Forums presents tools for SEO such as using excerpts instead of full post content, as well as the ability to use RSS for sitemaping. Using these tools to their optimum should eliminate the google 'Duplicate Content' deductions you mention, as well as provide you with top notch SEO on sections of your site that other webmaster's can only dream of.
-Radio- said:
If Goggle is going to punish your page rank because you have non-google ads, or if you produce a few landing pages with with excerpted content from the full content of your site, you will go crazy trying to adjust to every single nuance in their ranking system of the day.
Radio, AOC-Scott – That probably makes sense. I don't know much about SCO, but “if” the Google ranking penalty is significant, maybe it could be managed by having a Simple Press option to put a NoIndex meta tag on either the forum or on blog pages displaying linked posts. It probably should go on the forum topic page since it's generated by Simple Press and because one of the most common purposes of the linkage would be to drive traffic from busy forums to blogs.
Bill
-Radio-
You are absolutely correct. I focused too much on duplication as a justification for what I really want. The ability to seamlessly use simple press as the comment structure for my blog. Post a Comment = post in the form. I can probably hack it up a bit and use links as suggested, but I plan to rinse and repeat with various themes and such. The plugin doing the heavy lifting would be very helpful. I never used the “G” word and yet you knew exactly what I was referring to. 😉
I write nothing for Google, I host my own analytics and take their advice and criticism with a grain of salt. I shouldn’t have started with justifications … you caught me.
Scott
-Elfman
SCO is a version of Unix with a bad business model. You understand the basics of SEO.
I’m still mulling over the multiple blog to single mega forum idea. I like it.
Scott
AOC-Scott said:
-Elfman
SCO is a version of Unix with a bad business model. You understand the basics of SEO.
I’m still mulling over the multiple blog to single mega forum idea. I like it.
Scott
Oops, thanks for the correction Scott. Typing faster than I'm thinking…
Perhaps enabling a many to many blog to forum relationship would be better than limiting it to a many to one. Imagine a portal regarding WordPress (or anything else) with diversely focused forums. Contributers may give freely to each, but some also want to be able to easily archive their work (and perhaps reorganize it) in their own blog for their own purposes. Perhaps in ways that mirror our real world social systems.
Taking that capability a step further, enable posts to appear on multiple blogs and on multiple forums. But unlike the dreaded Usenet cross postings, it would be managed.
Bill
Just joined this forum and thread because no one else has made any of this work. There are a lot of half-baked solutions that almost work and get dropped when the developer gets his personal setup functional (i.e. wp2bb).
I don’t think most of us care about multiple blogs attached to a single forum, etc. We just have a fairly generic WP install, and we want the separate comment engine on our website to go away entirely and be replaced with forum threads.
Here’s what I imagine:
+ Blog posts automatically start a forum thread with a link to the original post. Forum thread subject format is settable: for instance, “Comment Thread: [$SUBJECT]”
Possible enhancement: magic tags can make the post appear somewhere besides the default forum.
+ The current blog commenting engine is disabled and not visible anywhere.
+ However, to the user, WP blog commenting looks exactly the same as it always has. This means that the blog engine is displaying a single forum thread instead of the comment thread (omitting the first post that is just a linkback, obviously), adding a “comment” is actually adding a forum post, and when it displays “X Comments”, it actually means “there are X – 1 posts in the forum thread”.
I would contribute money to anyone who had a stable solution that works and is easy to install and configure (and preferably works out of the box, as I’m not a web guru).
The Blog Post/Forum Topic linking will be the number one priority in 4.2. That is already decided. So a complete overhaul in other words.
But I don’t really follow what this means:
“Forum thread subject format is settable: for instance, ‘Comment Thread: [$SUBJECT]’
Possible enhancement: magic tags can make the post appear somewhere besides the default forum.”
spork said:
…I don't think most of us care about multiple blogs attached to a single forum, etc. We just have a fairly generic WP install, and we want the separate comment engine on our website to go away entirely and be replaced with forum threads…
spork – I agree. At most, multi-blog multi-forum comment integration is only useful to people wanting either multiple blogs or wanting to enhance the profiles of their forum members to resemble blogs. Most people don't need either. It's a niche market.
But what blows me away is that nobody, and I mean NOBODY has recognized that niche and captured it. I think it's a game changer, and when it proves itself, this will become a much larger market.
Yellow Swordfish, I'm not familiar with the data structures here, but I think something like this will be needed:
| tblComments | tblLINKComments_Threads | tblDiscussionThreads |
tblForumTopics | |||||||||
| CommentID | < | – | >> | CommentID | ThreadType | ForumID | ||||||
| Comment | ThreadID | << | – | ThreadID | << | – | > | ForumTopicID | ||||
| | | ||||||||||||
| | | tblBlogPosts | |||||||||||
| | | BlogID | |||||||||||
| – | > | BlogPostID |
Yellow Swordfish said:
The Blog Post/Forum Topic linking will be the number one priority in 4.2. That is already decided. So a complete overhaul in other words.
But I don’t really follow what this means:
“Forum thread subject format is settable: for instance, ‘Comment Thread: [$SUBJECT]’
Possible enhancement: magic tags can make the post appear somewhere besides the default forum.”
All that means is that, when the system automatically creates a comment thread on the forums for a new blog post, that the admin can set what the subject of the thread looks like.
For instance, some people might want the comment thread to have this subject:
COMMENTS: First Post To My New Blog!
And some might want:
First Post To My New Blog! – Comment Thread
Or:
[COMMENTS] First Post To My New Blog!
And so on. Just a string that lets the admin specify where the post subject appears inside it. (And, if you wanted to get fancy, some way to cut it off at X characters so your subject lines don’t wrap and get ugly.)
Let me take this opportunity to compliment you: I’m impressed by what you’ve done so far. SPF seems to cover the basics very well, and the SEO-friendly (and human-friendly) URLs are a great touch. Most of the world, including me, just wants a forum that works out of the box and looks the same as the rest of their WP site without going through a bunch of BS trying to get wp-united and phpBB and whatever else to play nice. SPF being an actual WP plugin is huge.
elfman: I don’t understand all the internals you’re talking about, but I agree that seamless comment integration will be a game-changer. People will realize what a great feature it is once other sites start using it, and I think that in a few years it’ll become a “how did we ever get along without this” situation, like CMS software in general.
spork said:
elfman: I don't understand all the internals you're talking about, but I agree that seamless comment integration will be a game-changer…
spork: Even if you understand data structures, the one I first posted was overcomplicated. This may make more sense.
UPDATED
| tblComments | tblLINKComponents | tblForumTopics | ||||||||
| CommentID | < | – | – | >> | CommentID | ForumID | ||||
| Comment | ThreadID | << | – | – | > | ForumTopicID | ||||
| … | ThreadType (Forum, Blog, etc…) | | | … | |||||||
| LinkID | | | |||||||||
| … | | | tblBlogPosts | ||||||||
| | | BlogID | |||||||||
| – | – | > | BlogPostID | |||||||
| … |