[Thaddeous]

Having issue with our site pages and BBPress. We are using WP 3.8.1 and the latest version of BB Press.

email: theig072@gmail.com
site: http://www.fretbuzz.com
site password: test12

We want to customize our BB Press page (title, maybe input a button or two… who knows) BUT there is no actual BB Press page to customize? The forum seems to be automatically created upon install. Normally we can edit any page by selecting “edit page” at the top of the screen and in this case, there is no edit page button because the page doesn’t exist.
Following? So the logical next step is to create the page right? Well… when we go to the backend of WP in the admin dashboard -> Settings -> Forums -> we read (about halfway down this page) this text:

“Forum Root Slug – Customize your Forums root. Partner with a WordPress Page and use Shortcodes for more flexibility.”

So we created a WP Page named forums. (http://www.fretbuzz.com/forums/) If this page is created then the forums appear until we edit anything. We cant select any option or input any text or the forums do not appear. So we deleted the page and the forums appear again. Then we created a separate WP page and labeled it test (http://www.fretbuzz.com/test/) and then moved the forum root slug to it, the forums again appear but If we again try to put any button shortcode or text or whatever in the page then nothing appears. So this begs the question…. What are the shortcodes BB Press talks about in the settings panel? How do we customize our BB Press Forums page?

End goal = Create an actual page that hold the forum roots on which we can add a button or two (with maybe some text). With an actual page as the root slug, I have access to turn on or off options as well such as “ratings” and “Author Bio”, which is quite annoying on the forums currently.

Our theme (DynamiX) has almost 9000 support members and this is what one of the support moderators said:

“Hi Tad,
I am not sure if this feature works correctly as I have tested it with DynamiX and the standard WP theme and they both have the same results. It must be a feature of BBPress that does not work properly.
Tom”

This cannot be so…. Any suggestions. Any help is highly coveted. 🙂

[Stephen Edgar]

Shortcode docs are here https://codex.bbpress.org/shortcodes/

[Thaddeous]

Thank you Stephen,
I got the page to work now with the shortcodes, BUT the shortcodes don’t seem to be displaying what the description says they should be displaying. Backup first…. Here is what we am trying to do with BBPress: We are trying to create forums under specific categories. Sounds easy. We placed all forums under specific categories but this wasn’t quite displaying as we needed them to all on one page. We need them to display like this forum here: http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/

SO back to the shortcode problem. We cant get any of these forums to display a single forum. The shortcodes are displaying ALL forums no matter if we use single forums shortcodes or not.
Shouldnt the below shortcodes display these five forum ids only and not ALL forums five times just with a reply form for the associated ID at the bottom?

[bbp-single-forum id=239]
[bbp-single-forum id=238]
[bbp-single-forum id=237]
[bbp-single-forum id=236]
[bbp-single-forum id=235]

Basically we are trying to split up these forums manually with the shortcodes just by displaying what forums we want (and we could separate them with a text box showing the category or something). So the question is, “What is the shortcode for only displaying one forum without a reply form”. This way we can input all forums and organize them how we wish. Make sense? Please help. 🙂

[Stephen Edgar]

Ok… I think I follow now, take a look at the following thread, it is a good example of customizing the bbPress templates to have the forum layout like a phpBB or vBulletin format.

I have created a bbPress starter theme with a phpBB look and feel