: Best free CMS for website with a forum? EDIT: This is NOT a duplicate to the question linked above. I went through many of the CMS listed there and they didn't work for me (see explanation

Posted in: #Cms #Forum #Joomla #Phpbb #Wordpress

EDIT: This is NOT a duplicate to the question linked above. I went through many of the CMS listed there and they didn't work for me (see explanation below).

I'm currently looking for a good free CMS to create a website with static pages and a forum attached. Later on, I want to give members the possibility to work on static pages and possibly have a blog of their own on the site. One important requirement for me is that I want the entire website to have a consistent look and feel, so completely separate platforms for the static and the forum part aren't really an option.

So far, I've tried:

Wordpress with various forum extensions: Nice for static content, but bbPress looks horrible even with "compatible" themes and all other forum extensions have basic features like private messaging behind a paywall.
Joomla with Kunena: Good free themes with Kunena support are hard to find. The ones I did find looked very nice on their demo pages, but horrible on my test website. I could never get them to work.
phpBB with a bridge to Wordpress or Joomla: Wordpress bridges didn't give the site a consistent look and feel. The only Joomla bridge isn't free.

Does anyone have suggestions for other systems with a modern, consistent appearance? Or am I doing something wrong with the CMS I tried and there are ways to make it work?

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