bbPress.org

Okay, I’ve been doing some digging and perhaps as expected, the theme Template page.php (the default WP Template) is being called to build the Archive Base page.  I can edit the page.php in my child theme and customize from there (where it eventually calls the_content(), which apparently executes content-archive-forum.php to display the Forum “front page”), but that’s a brute-force method since page.php is the default Template for all pages. I want to create a Template explicitly for bbPress pages, which means I need a way to specify the Template to use on a per-page basis.

Normally this would be done by simply creating a Template (like page.php) and put it in your child theme directory, then select it for a specific page you want to apply it to using the wp-admin Edit Page -> Page Attributes -> Template pull down, save it and voila, your page uses your custom Template.

But with bbPress pages that are “partnered with a WordPress page” (per this topic discussion), this doesn’t work for the partnered page.  The Template setting seems to be ignored, and only for bbPress pages partnered this way.

This may not be a show-stopper for me, but may be for others looking to customize the overall page Template for their bbPress pages.  Is it a bbPress bug?  I can’t tell, and hopefully I’m missing something painfully obvious, being new to installing/using bbPress.

Seems like there must be some kind of code frag in the plugin that does something like:

if (request to display (Archive Base | Topic Base) {
  if ((Archive Base | Topic Base) is partnered with WP page) {
    point the_content() at (content-archive-forum.php | content-archive-topic.php);
    call default page Template;
  }
}


JJJ or someone else in-the-know, can you comment on how the “partnering with a WordPress page” works? Where is this performed? Sorry if the question is naive, I’m just having trouble understanding how this partnering works at the Template execution level.

Many thanks.
Michael

Okay, I’ve made some further progress with method #3 above (hooking into bbp_get_bbpress_template ).  Here’s the general approach I’m taking:

add_filter( 'bbp_get_bbpress_template', 'my_add_page_template', $templates );
function my_add_page_template( array $templates ) {
  $page_template = get_post_meta( $post_id, '_wp_page_template', true );
  if ( $page_template != 'default' )
    array_unshift( $templates, $page_template );
return $templates;
}


The only issue I have right now is that $post_id is difficult to extract if the archive pages (Archive Base and Topics Base) are being displayed. Right now I am hard wiring it to the post_id of the Archive Base page (getting it from the editor), and it works okay but not what I want.

Since these pages (archives) are custom post types, I haven’t found an easy way to find their post_id’s, and querying globals like $post->ID and calling functions like get_the_ID() and url_to_postid() don’t work for custom post IDs ($post->ID and get_the_ID() return 0).

QUESTION: For a bbPress page that is currently being built for display, is the post_id of the page being stored somewhere in a bbPress global?

Michael

Hi John James — thanks for responding, much appreciated.

Regarding get_the_ID() not working on an archive page, I understanding your point — there isn’t a page associated with it.

The only issue I have is that the Forum Archive page is associated (“partnered” to use the documentation phrase) with a real page, and essentially it is just a regular page with embedded shortcodes.

In my case, the partnered page has content and embedded shortcodes, and it has a real page ID (#1296 in my case).  That’s what I wanted to find so I can extract information specific to that partnered page.

What am I doing with all this?  Well, the short story is that certain specific pages on my website have some special header images attached above the_content(), and I have created a custom Template in my child theme to handle it.  Information about the slug is extracted, which is used to lookup random images in a database of images.

I’m trying to keep a consistent approach with all pages, hence the use of a custom Template that I set as a page attribute in the editor.

None of this is fatal for my needs, but if a page is partnered with the Forum or Topic Archive pages, it seems like the selected Template for displaying those pages should come from the Template page attribute associated with it.  Hence the need for post ID of the partnered page.

Cheers.

Michael