bbPress.org

Yes, and I totally agree, the documentation is woeful, unfortunately those that know the answers won’t update, and the rest of us work out bits that function, but are never sure whether these are the best ways.

Anyway onto your question.

bbPress is a plugin, and out of the box it works well with twentyten, and I understand twentyeleven.

Beyond that you’ll need to style it.

This consist of two elements :

Functionality
Styling

Functionality

I create a page called “forums”, and then put whatever forum text at the top followed by the forum shortcut [bbp-forum-index]

See http://www.gospbc.co.uk/forums/ for an example

Then loading a plugin called bbPress WP tweaks adds a forum sidebar to your widgets area.

I have loaded this with a login widget, forum list, recent topics and recent replies, as well as some other stuff from my website. See link about for what is in there.

This then gives you a basic forum area.

Then onto

styling
bbPress using the default bbpress.css as it style doc unless you tell it otherwise

You can customise look and feel – fonts, colours, background quite easily by using one of two methods, knowing what to change is the hard part !

If you have an existing child theme, you can override the bbpress default for elements by adding them to your own child theme style.css BUT you need to put !important into them to prevent the bbpress plugin from loading later and overwriting them with the default

As an example if you wanted to change the font-size of the forums list you’d put the following into your css

#bbpress-forums .bbp-forums-list li {
	font-size: 11px !important;
	}

The alternate method, and perhaps better if you want to make lots of changes, is to copy the default bbpress.css from /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/templates/default/css
to /wp-content/themes/%your-theme%/css/

you can then edit it there to your hearts content, and you don’t need the !important bit.

OK so how do I know what to edit?

You’ll need to get familiar with using something like firebug with firefox. This lets you examine sections of your website and see precisely what css element is styling it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdIk2PztcL0 gives the start of a tutorial on this

When I get a moment, I’ll start to add this to the bbpress documentation.

I only started with WordPress and bbPress in March, and am still learning the basics !

That theme you are trying to install ‘Static-Blue-BB’ is for the old standalone version of bbPress and will not work with the current version of bbPress 2.x Plugin for WordPress.

bbPress now use’s your WordPress theme, i.e. your ‘main theme’, if you want to tweak the templates of your theme click the ‘themes’ link at the top of this page and follow the link there.