Everyone is familiar with forums. They were the main channel of communication on the web for a long time - whether through Reddit, Quora, Tripadvisor, or other sites, at some point, most of us have interacted with an online forum. Now, although chat room platforms are more popular, they can’t match the organized and clean communication potential of forums. Of course, the Forums app is not just for communication - you can use it as a blog, an announcement channel, and more.
Most platforms that allow instant communication between individuals face the problem of keeping the conversations together - and forums are the solution. This is why Whop offers the Forums app, which creates a free forum channel that creators can add to their whops.
In this guide, we’re going to go over what Whop apps are, how you can add the Forums app to your whop, and how you can set up and use it.
What are Whop Apps?
Apps on Whop can be explained as LEGO bricks - when you first create a whop, it will be an empty baseplate. In order to create something great, you have to start adding bricks to it. Now, think of your dream platform. Is it a public community of developers? Or a paid day trading course? Any type of platform you can think of will require you to use different Whop apps - or LEGO bricks, in this case. They will define how your whop operates and how users interact with it.
Just like bricks, you can add, swap, remove, and do anything you want with apps on Whop - they’re free to add. It takes just two clicks to add them and three clicks to remove them. You can even add multiple instances of the single app, allowing you to add layers to your platform, and give them different names so that you know what they are. For example, you could add the Chat app twice, using one as regular chat and the other as a VIP paid chat.
There are a lot of apps for you to choose from, and as we mentioned, each one has its own unique feature. If you want to create a place for your members to communicate, you can use the Chat app to create chat rooms - or if you’re looking to share sports picks, you can utilize the powerful Sports App.
What is the Forums App?
If you’ve been using the internet for a while, you know what forums are. They’re communication channels where people create individual “posts.” One of the best examples of forum platforms is Reddit. Users on Reddit create posts that can have images, text, videos, links, and more. Then, people can click on the posts and comment on them. Unlike chat rooms, this allows people to have organized chats.
The Forums app on Whop serves exactly that purpose. People can create threads within the app using text, images, and files - if they’re an admin, they can even paywall the posts. However, communication between members isn't the only use of the app. Since you have the freedom to choose whether you want everyone to be able to post or just admins, you can use the Forums app for user-generated content, public blogs, announcement channels, and more - there are countless ways to utilize the app. The posts on the Forum app can be listed on Google, and this can help you with being found on Google - boosting your traffic.
Setting up and using the Forums app is very easy. Let’s see how you can add it to your own whop.
How to Add the Forums App to Your whop
You can add the Forums app to your whop just like any other app. But before moving on to the process of adding apps, you need to have a whop ready. If you don’t already have a whop, check out our How to Create Your Own whop guide, which will walk you through every step of creating a whop.
Once you've got your whop ready you can add the Forums app. The first step of adding apps to a whop is to go to the app list by clicking on the Add apps button under the Admin Area of your whop. Doing this will direct you to the list of all available apps you can add to your whop.
After you click the Add apps button, you’ll see all Whop apps listed on your screen. There, find the Forums app and click the Add app button of it to immediately add the app to your whop.
After you add the Forums app, you’ll be directed to its Set up section. Now it’s time to learn how you can use the app. Let’s examine each section of the Forums app.
Using the Whop Forums App
Just like every other app on Whop, the Forums app has sections. Most apps have at least three of them: Set up, Preview as user, and Access. As their name suggests, each serves a different purpose. You can switch between the sections of an app using the navigation bar at the top of your screen.
1. Set up
The Set up section of the Forums app is where you define how the app looks, works and how users interact with it. There are seven settings you can configure in the Set up section, and the first setting we see is the Banner Image. As its name suggests, the banner image setting determines what image is going to be displayed at the top of your Forums app as a banner. The recommended image size of the banner is 2200 x 460 pixels with an aspect ratio of 43:9.
You can upload an image by clicking on the Upload image button and selecting your desired image.
The second and third settings you can find in the Set up section of the Forums app are Post Layout and Accent Color. The post layout setting has two options: Feed, which will list posts in a horizontal feed, and Blog, which will list posts in bento-style boxes.
The accent color setting has seven unique colors for you to choose from. They will define the colors of buttons and other colored objects in the Forums app. Let’s select the green option, for example, and all blue-ish accents we see so far will be green from now on.
Moving on, we see the Who can post? And Default comment permissions settings. Who can post? setting has two options: Everyone, which lets everyone who can access the Forums app (we will detail access in the 3: Access section) create posts, and Only Admins, which only allows the admins of your whop to create posts. If you’re planning to use the Forums app as an announcement channel, we suggest you select the Only Admins option here - otherwise, select Everyone.
The Default comment permissions setting has two options as well: Everyone, which lets everyone who can access the app leave comments on posts, and Only Admins, which only lets admins of your whop leave comments.
The Description setting, as its name suggests, allows you to write down a description for the Forums app, which will make it easier for people to discover it. The description should be a simple, descriptive, one to two sentence long summary. Of course, this is just a recommendation, you can write a text as long as you like. After writing down the description, you can click on the Save button to confirm the changes.
The last setting we have in the Set up section of the Forums app is the Discord webhook. As you might know, Discord supports webhooks - users can create webhook URLs for their channels and use them to relay messages. Check out our How to Create Discord Webhooks guide to learn more about creating webhooks.
In this setting, you can enter a webhook URL that you got from Discord and click the Save button to automatically send all forum posts to a Discord channel.
After entering your webhook URL and saving the setting, you’ll start to get messages on your Discord channel for all forum posts. If you ever want to disable this feature, you can just delete the URL that’s in the Discord webhook setting of your Forums app and click the Save button.
2. Preview as user
The Preview as user section allows you to see Forums from the perspective of a regular user. It also lets you use the app yourself - all posts you share in this section will be live for everyone. When you first visit this section, you might see the “New Posts will show up here” message, which means there aren’t any posts for now. If there were, they’d be listed here. Let’s break down the Preview as user tab’s parts so you know how to make posts:
- Title: This is the section where you give your post a title.
- Post content: This is the section where you write down the contents of the post.
- File attachment: This is the button that lets you attach files to your post.
- Image attachment: This is the button that lets you attach images to your post.
- Paywall: This is the button that lets you paywall your post so that only people who pay a certain amount can see the post. This option is only visible for admins of the whop.
- Post button: This is the button that lets you publish your post.
- Create post button: This is the button that opens up a full-screen post editor that lets you create a post.
3. Access
Almost all apps on whop have two access types: Free and Paid/Private. You can switch between them as you wish. Selecting the Free option will allow everyone on the internet to join your whop and use the Forums app. If you’ve selected the Everyone option of Who can post? setting, anyone who has the link to your whop will be able to post on the Forums app.
If you select the Paid/Private option, you’re basically gating the app with a product. When you select the Paid/Private option, you’ll see a list of all the products on your whop and toggle buttons next to them. When you toggle a product, you’ll be linking it with the app, meaning that only the users who obtained that product will be able to use the Forums app.
If you don’t have any products, you’ll see the “Create a product to make this app private” message and a Create product button. You can easily create products using that button.
Create the Perfect Platform with Whop
After reading this guide you should now know how to add the Forums app to your whop. The next step is improving your whop knowledge by checking out our comprehensive guides or joining Whop University.
Get started with your online community today using Whop.
