[mzimmers]

Hi –

After a few false starts, I got the alpha version of bbPress installed and sharing user data with WP (yay!), so now, I’m thinking about making bbPress look more seamless.

Specifically, I’m thinking of stuff like:

– adding a banner to bbpress like that of my WP

– changing the logo (I know, this should be simple)

– containing bb within the main area of my WP pages

– adding a navigation button to return to my WP pages from bb

Reading through the sticky on the subject has me wondering whether I should bother to try to do any of this, or wait until the bb product is a bit more mature.

Any sage words of advice on what I should and shouldn’t try to tackle?

[mzimmers]

Hmm…nobody wants to chime in on this. I suppose I should interpret that as a “don’t mess with prosperity” signal?

[chrishajer]

> – adding a banner to bbpress like that of my WP

Not sure what you mean there. If it’s navigation you need, you probably want integration with WordPress so you can use the WordPress functions like get_header and get_sidebar. If you mean just a banner ad of some sort, you can just add that to the template file header.php

> – changing the logo (I know, this should be simple)

It is. Just look in header.php for the header div, and style.css for the corresponding css.

> – containing bb within the main area of my WP pages

Not so easy. It doesn’t work well (or at all) in a WordPress page. It’s not a plugin for WordPress, it’s a standalone forum. If you want it to look like a WordPress page, you probably want integration as explained in item one above, or here.

> – adding a navigation button to return to my WP pages

> from bb

Also easy, like changing the logo. You can do it in header.php if you want the link up top. Or you can edit another template file if you want the link somewhere else.

[chrishajer]

Also, before making changes to a stock template, you probably want to make a new directory called my-templates, then inside there a new directory called $whatever-you-want (maybe “forumtemplate” or “mytemplate” or “newlook”). Then inside that directory, copy over all the files and subdirectories from the bb-templates/kakumei/ directory. Now, in your new directory, edit the top of style.css to change the template name to something unique. Once you’ve done that, you can log in as keymaster, then select your new template, by name, since the screenshot will still look like kakumei since that’s what you copied over. Select the new template and look at your site. It should look the same as it did before, because you didn’t make any changes yet.

Now, confine all your changes to these template files, and if you break something you can always fall back on the default kakumei, or compare to see where you went wrong.

[antoniop]

Chrishajer, whats going on. I’m attempting to get my bbpress theme to look like my wordpress theme. I’ve done what you said above (my-templates folder with the kakumei theme). Now what do I need to do? Do I need to use wordpress functions (then get_header & get footer)?

Thanks

Antonio

[chrishajer]

Yes, using those functions will bring the header and footer over. Whether or not they look like you want is up to you to decide. The functions will work, but your bbPress template needs to be setup to display the WordPress header/footer/sidebar properly.