Looking for noticeboard plugin

Now, you need to ask yourself… What’s the purpose of this noticeboard? Is it to place ads? A guestbook? … A notice board is quite broad and maybe if you look for a plugin with the actual needs, it might be easier to find.

In addition to that, how are you going to stop spam and bots? Since as soon as you place a textbox they can fill in … They will go ham. Keep that in mind as well while searching for a plugin. Security should be something you don’t skip in things like this.

Also, are users going to be able to edit/remove their message?

Is there going to be a report button to report malicious comments that got somehow through moderation?

Sadly, I don’t really know a plugin … But maybe with these hints you might find something that fits your needs.

Thanks for your suggestions – I’ll keep all those things in mind!

I’m looking for the same kind of thing. This is for a new closed membership buddypress site which will be used to connect boarders and staff at a horse boarding barn, about 20 boarders and staff that know each other well. So there’s no spam concern.

We currently just use a combination of a cork board and a white board in the main aisle. Anybody can put up or take down notices or write/erase things on the white board. But some of the boarders live a distance away, and don’t get up to the barn all that often to see the latest stuff. Searching for plugins I haven’t been able to find anything that seems all that appropriate.

We need a calendar, too, that anyone can write on, as there is one in the tack room for that purpose; but again, you can only see it if you happen to be there.

There’s not really a structure to these things, and not a single user that organizes them. Notes and posts come and go at the whim of the boarders and staff. It shouldn’t be necessary to have admin privileges on the site to add/edit/remove stuff.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Well, I came across a plugin called Hootboard that looked pretty promising. So I installed and activated it. It added an item to the left navigation bar in the admin dashboard, but clicking it just showed a blank page on the right. I was running WordPress 6.6.2, and it had only been tested up to 6.2. So I contacted their support, and the next day they acknowledged the bug, said they would let me know when it was fixed, and within an hour of the acknowledgement they sent another email saying it was fixed and that I should update the plugin. So I did, and then clicking on the item in the navigation bar showed content. That’s the good news.

The less good news is that the content shown Is basically a link to their own website, hootboard.com, where you need to sign up and create an account to use their editor to create and publish content that is hosted on their site. Apparently their content editor is much better than the WordPress editor. And their are security options that let you hide both the board itself, and individual posts (called hoots) from the internet at large, allowing only specified hootboard.com accounts to see the content. They provide html code that you can embed on your WordPress page to view the board. I haven’t tried that yet, but I’ll guess that it works pretty well. I’m just stuck on the fact that it means paying some kind of subscription fee, and that each one of my BuddyPress members apparently would have to sign up for a (free) hootboard account in order to be able to view or post on the board…

Since Hootboard wasn’t quite suitable given the constraints of my environment, I kept looking, and found this plugin: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/notes-widget-wrapper/ I haven’t installed it yet, but it looks very promising. You create the content on your own site, and then post it as a widget. In my case, I’d probably create two separate pages with big widget areas, one for cork board postings, and the other for white board postings. It doesn’t meet my criterion for allowing any user to add/edit/delete notes, but it turns out the barn owner doesn’t want to allow that, so restricting to the Editor role will be good enough.