Reply To: Two questions: 1 – can I just have a forum without a category? 2…
No it wasn’t an auto reply to your post.
I presumed what you were looking for is in point 4 of ‘Creating your first forum’ where you can define if a forum is a parent category or straight forum. In the case you were asking you simply create the forum as a forum and not a category.
https://codex.bbpress.org/getting-started-with-bbpress/#creating-your-first-forum
> Adjust your Forum attributes. These are:
> Types: choose whether you are creating a Forum or category.
> Forum – can contain topics and be the parent of other forums.
> Category – can only contain forums (no topics). Use for organizing your forums.
> You may, for example, have a Category “Open Source Software” with the > Forums “bbPress” and “WordPress”.
And yes forum wide search is planned for a future release
