Without coding up your own forum addon, the best solution I can think of is to create a page for each new forum topic, and put a Guestbook block on that page. I think you can restrict that to registered users of the site.

It ain't pretty, and it doesn't allow users to start their own threads, but for no money and no time it might be a decent compromise.

If this is a must, should I just go to Drupal (since the site hasn't really been launched to my organization yet)?

Depends on what you're building -- is this primarily a forum site with just a few other content pages on it? Then I'd recommend Vanilla Forums (http://vanillaforums.org ). Is it primarily a blog with a forum attached? Then you probably want wordpress and bbpress. Is it primarily an informational website but with a forum as one minor part of it? Joomla might be better for you than Drupal (Drupal is very flexible and has tons of addons for everything, but this gives it a pretty steep learning curve). Also take a look at vBulletin -- it's ugly but very functional and I think the newest version has a bunch of CMS features (although that might be for the paid version -- not sure).
None of these solutions will give you as nice of a CMS building and editing experience as Concrete5, but if a free forum is a requirement, then yeah you're going to want to look at some alternatives.

Best of luck.

-Jordan

Well you should have said, if you want a forum AND a blog, install wordpress then install the plugin BuddyPress. In the dashboard there is bbPress.

I would be really great if a C5 developer could build an add-on as robust and nice as the BuddyPress plug-in for Wordpress. Bet they would sell a bunch of them, I'd buy the first one! I tried to install he current "wall" add-on offered by C5 but it is not compatible with the latest version of C5.

That's not our addon. We do have something new and exciting in the works for this by the end of the year

Best wishes
Pecked out on an iPhone

Sorry for showing my ignorance. What would it be called if not an "add-on?"

Really great to know that you guys are developing in this area. BuddyPress was introduced to me by a "buddy" of mines. It seems to be the only thing about WP that I am interested in. I'll stick with C5, thank you!

I think @frz means it's not *their* addon -- so it is definitely an addon, but is not "offered by the C5 team". A few of the addons in the marketplace are made by the C5 team themselves, but most are made by other people.

Cool... Thanks for pointing that out!