Simple yet powerful plugin for bbpress

I was struggling to run a ‘private’ forum that was viewable to the public. My wife wanted one of her forum title and details to be publicly viewable because it has the most topics and replies. However it is a members only forum, so how to make a ‘private’ forum public, when the normal ‘private’ option in bbpress hides the whole thing from view?

Enter Robin’s simple plugin. You keep the private forum public and then use the plugin settings to set whether the title is viewable, topics and replies are viewable, or topics and replies invisible, and so on. The trick is to then create a private group and assign whoever is a member of the forum into that group by editing the user profile in the normal WP way.

My wife has hers set so that you can see the title, but if you click on it and you’re not part of the new private group, you get taken to a page explaining that it’s a members only forum. Genius.