bbPress.org

I just spent about 8 frustrating hours failing to accomplish a very basic task with bbpress.

I want my forums & their descriptions grouped grouped by category on the index page. A long jumble of forums on different topics, only ever displayed in “most recently updated” order, or alternatively without displaying the forum descriptions, is totally unusable. I don’t want people to have to hunt through subpages to find which forum is correct to post in for an issue.

I just want an index page that shows ALL the information: Forum titles, Categories, and Descriptions, for all forums, on a page. In some sort of order that isn’t going to leave the users scratching their heads as to where to find what they want. Is that really too advanced to expect bb software to do?

Some sort of organization, on the index page, or at least headings, is really a basic feature of, uh, every single forum I’ve ever seen. Organizing information into sensible sections been a fundamental part of information design since… the printing press? The written word? Hieroglyphics? I don’t know. But bbpress’s index page is an unfriendly, unusable mess, and the only feature you provide for grouping forums makes the situation worse, not better.

I went with a plugin based solution because I didn’t want to sit and code a solution myself. After spending all day on this problem, I am aware that there are complicated, far-over-my-head solutions which may or may not work, telling me I must do things I don’t understand, and which sound to me like they may be wiped out and need to be re-entered every time a theme or plugin is updated.

I can’t put any more time into this simple need. We have multiple users in my group who are going to be able to create new categories and forums, and it needs to _just_work_ , and display an index that makes sense to users, without hours upon hours of troubleshooting and administration.