[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

If you can access rss xml from flash (which I believe you can) just grab it from the rss feed (/forum/rss.php). You can tell the rss to send you almost anything you want, latest, specific sub-forums, etc.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Ah nevermind – I already knew how to do this but was so tired I didn’t put 2 + 2 together. And a new plugin was born!

This plugin will either exclude ALL sub-forums from the front page topics list AND/OR exclude any specific forums from the front page that you specify.

function filter_front_page_topics($where){

// $exclude_forums=array ("8,1,3,12");   // enable this to manually specify specific forums by id #

$forums = get_forums(); foreach ($forums as $forum) {if  ($forum->forum_parent) {$exclude_forums[]=$forum->forum_id;}}  // exclude ALL sub-forums

if ( is_front() ) {foreach($exclude_forums as $forum) { $where.=" AND forum_id != ".$forum."  "; }}

return  $where;

}

add_filter( 'get_latest_topics_where', 'filter_front_page_topics');

add_filter( 'get_latest_posts_where', 'filter_front_page_topics');

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

This plugin now has an official page in the plugin browser:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/55

so check there for latest version.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

I would encourage you to put this into the bbpress svn so it can be found under the plugin browser by the masses trying to integrate WP + BB

(if I figured out how to use the SVN, anyone can!)

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

There is an obscure cookie control plugin for wordpress that I found somewhere around here I think:

http://www.2diabolos.com/blog/plugins-pour-wordpress/setcookieparams/

the bbpress config options you want are like this:

$bb->wp_table_prefix = 'wp_';  // WordPress table prefix.  Example: 'wp_';

$bb->wp_home = 'http://example.com/blog';  // WordPress - Options->General: Blog address (URL) // Example: 'http://example.com'

$bb->wp_siteurl = 'http://example.com';  // WordPress - Options->General: WordPress address (URL) // Example: 'http://example.com'



$bb->usercookie = 'wordpressuser_ab1b1c8b2de0ca2b381c25a6b6e812a1';

$bb->passcookie = 'wordpresspass_ab1b1c8b2de0ca2b381c25a6b6e812a1';

$bb->cookiedomain = 'example.com';

$bb->cookiepath = '/';

you also obviously want this plugin:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/2?replies=3

and less obviously this one is a must for WP integration:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/usernames-with-spaces-do-not-work?replies=24#post-7904

unfortunately it’s not setup here as a formal plugin but it should be – see my dot fix at the end

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

I guess part of my concern is how casually it’s either told or assumed that BB integrates with WP, and that BB is ready for primetime. There’s good reason why it’s set at a pre-1.0 version number.

Many people here are integrating micro-forums with a handful of members, never more than a few people on at the same time. If there’s a problem, it can wait as it’s not an active website.

But my experience with BB was that tried integrating BB with several hundred members on a WP site. I eventually had to take it offline a week later. Here’s why:

First it took a day or two to find the plugin to fix spaces with usernames. Eventually I found out spaces were not the only problem, dots were not covered so I had to patch that.

Then I found out that many people had their cookies set to “remember me” which means even when you fix the cookie path so it off the root, it’s useless because the old cookie will never delete. Had to deal with dozens of emails and complaints and give them all individual instructions. Then there’s the problem of hundreds of people making hundreds of posts without any mods.

Unlike WordPress, the bbpress moderation tools are non-existant. It’s a non-issue for a micro-forum because you’ve literally got a 1 to 10 mod to user ratio. But now multiply that by 700-800 very active members. You’d then need 70 to 80 mods since every message posted has to be read by hand, by going into the thread and dealing with each one!

The ideal ratio is maybe one mod to 100 users or higher would be better, but you can’t do that without the right tools. There’s no way to browse through all posts at once and moderate immediately or setup some kind of automation process.

There’s no working badwords filter, there’s no way to limit posts that are too short or too long, there’s no post merging tool, there’s no adjustable posting rate per user, there’s no way to keep in touch with moderators. All this has to be added in with plugins, many not fully debugged yet or working correctly with 0.8.2.1 Some of them were not improved until just recently after I made feature requests after trying to use them.

It was exhausting and depressing so I took bbpress offline. But I am trying to help improve bbpress, not just complain. I think it’s about to hit critical mass with the growing number of people using it and more powerful plugins available and it has a lot of potential.

If I had a commercial forum with ads and made money off it, I’d go buy vbulletin as it’s the king and has years of trial and error and getting it right. But most people who use bbpress won’t be doing it for commercial reasons.

So that’s why I’m curious when I read that someone walked away from another forum program and switched to bbpress…

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Wow I’ve never seen that theme switching site. Nice demo there.

They need to put a notice you need cookies enabled for it to work though.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Remember that many users will already have the “remember me” set for their cookie on wordpress and that doesn’t expire for a year. This means their bbpress login will mysteriously fail. They’ll either give up or re-register a new nickname.

You also need the space and period plugin fix for names. WordPress allows them, bbpress doesn’t by default. So anyone with a space or period in their nickname will fail logging into bbPress. Not knowing such things can drive you mad.

I also went a step further and routed all the login links on bbpress back to the wordpress login box since it has a few extra features. I use the redirect_to option to bring them back to bbpress.

ps. another good integration thread for a future integration sub-forum

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Yeah the only problem I can foresee is that the plugin browser looks like a semi-custom job and I am uncertain if it’s hard coded into the template.

(In other news I finally figured out how to use SVN last night and posted my two little plugins directly… we’ll need to have a “100 plugins party” when bbpress hits that many…

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

If you are just making one locked post with no replies then WordPress will suit you better. Forums are best for users being able to start threads themselves. Blog-like CMS software is best for 1-to-many.

The other benefit of WordPress is that you can have unlimited alias nicknames and anonymous self-posting with alias nicknames. So you could pretend to be “Microsoft” when you post and then later if Microsoft really becomes a client you can give them a true login with the real username.

Last but not least wordpress has far more development and plugins and contributors than bbpress at this time. Something to consider for a commercial application.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Be sure to see my nifty update at the end of that thread.

I suspect 4.01 will be out shortly

I really like this plugin, gives bbpress a higher end forum feature.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

I guess I meant Kakumei which will use either 800×600 or 1024×768 much more appropriately than this old layout.

This layout isn’t even 800×600, it’s 600px wide, not because there is a sidebar or anything, just because.

There’s no-one left using 640×480. If they are using a mobile browser they can just use the rss feeds and a converter.

Wait are you saying we can change the theme here ourselves? I guess you really meant on your own site(s).

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Ah I see. It’s the misconception that by name alone, that bbpress integrates easily/well with wordpress. You’ll find several experiences that it does not integrate easily or well by default. Between the nasty cookie issue and the even worse username issue, it makes no attempts on it’s own to integrate. You’ll need a few plugins and some trial and error with members.

I’ll suggest again to the powers that be that an integration sub-forum might be a good idea to warn/help others. The mini-faq doesn’t begin to cover the issues.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

bbPress’s auto-close tags is broken by default – though the code and filter is in there, it’s not passed correctly:

add this to a plugin

function force_balance_tags($text) {return balanceTags($text, true);}

add_filter('pre_post', 'force_balance_tags');

or if you don’t know how, use my tweaks plugin:

http://ckon.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/bbpress-plugin-bb-tweaks/

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

If anyone is interested I have a much higher speed routine that runs on mysql instead of the ip2c flatfile. For highly active forums the extra speed is a must. I benchmarked the firestats way against the mysql way and mysql is 4-5x faster in all cases because it caches.

(Omry is working on a memcached version of his 500k flatfile, so eventually it might beat mysql but not anytime soon – his cached java version is 100x faster than mysql but that doesn’t help us)

I don’t have it packaged as a plugin and would have to write the code to automate the database table creation for the data from webhostinfo.info but I’d be willing to sit down and do it if there is serious interest.

I just love putting little flags next to my forum posts to show off how international the forum is, but that’s just me.

ps. “country” is spelled wrong in this topic’s title

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Every time I see a conversion script I have to ask (and not necessarily in a negative way) “what made you decide to convert to bbpress?”

There are several well developed forum programs that endusers have now made conversion scripts to bbpress and I just have to wonder why someone would take a working setup and covert it?

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Offhand I’d guess that the last poster function is meant to be “in the loop” for a per topic basis. Because you are trying to use it for an entire sub-forum, it’s missing a topic id reference. You’d have to calculate the last topic that the last poster posted in.

Posting the code to that part of the template would help (at least for me)

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Apparently WordPress allows dots (periods) in usernames as well?! (it did at some point, not sure if it still does but I have users with nicknames like that)

So I had to modify this plugin with a dot

return preg_replace('/[^ ta-z0-9_.-]/i', '', str_replace("%20"," ",$raw));

apparently php is very sensitive as to what order the pattern is in, that dot has to be right there in the sequence or it throws a shedload of errors.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

I have posted several changes and fixes, over here since there seems to be two threads on this plugin (and apparently bbpress won’t be able to merge topics anytime soon)

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/46/page/2?replies=34#post-352

#4 is a doozy. You might want to make that a priority in the next version. Filenames *must* be unique for every uploaded change to ensure proper caching and then image updates in the browser when the image changes.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Fourth time is the charm? Ugh. Sorry!

<?php

/*

Plugin Name: Admin Can Post Anything

Plugin URI:

Description: allows keymaster/administrators to post any content regardless of tag restrictions

Author: _ck_

Author URI: http://CKon.wordpress.com

Version: 0.04

*/



function bb_admin_post_anything($text) {

if (bb_current_user_can('administrate') ) {

remove_filter('pre_post', 'encode_bad' );

remove_filter('pre_post', 'bb_encode_bad' );

remove_filter('pre_post', 'bb_filter_kses', 50);

remove_filter('pre_post', 'addslashes', 55);

remove_filter('pre_post', 'bb_autop', 60);

$text=bb_autop(addslashes($text));  // I don't completely understand why this is necessary here but it is



// the following two lines are untested code to allow compatibility with the allow images plugin

// it's safe to remove it's filters because this only happens if admin are trying to post

remove_filter( 'pre_post', 'allow_images_encode_bad', 9 );

remove_filter( 'pre_post', 'allow_images', 52 );

}

return $text;

}

add_filter('pre_post', 'bb_admin_post_anything',;

?>

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

I’ve been studying to see if there’s anyway via plugins instead of hacking the code for both WP and BB to consolidate the common javascript routines they both use.

Not only do they load half a dozen scripts at certain times, one of them, prototype.js is 50k in size. But they seem to be common for both.

All we would need is choose a common script path.

I guess it’s possible to

remove_action(‘bb_head’, ‘bb_print_scripts’);

and then plugin your own.

But what kills me is bbPress doesn’t need ANY of those scripts except for thinks like deleting posts to forward correctly and the ajax actions.

I really dislike ajax, especially when it’s used where it’s not needed.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

I posted v0.03 on my wp blog

https://ckon.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/admin-can-post-anythingphp.doc

(rename to *.php)

Let me know if the allow images hack works?

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Okay by adding these to the remove_filters list, you can also run allow images:

remove_filter( 'pre_post', 'allow_images_encode_bad', 9 );

remove_filter( 'pre_post', 'allow_images', 52 );

It may also be necessary to increase my filter priority to 8, ie.

add_filter('pre_post', 'bb_admin_post_anything',;

Since I can’t edit my first post I will try to add it to the repository with the changes?

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

I will look at the code for allow images but I suspect it’s because they must run one of the three bad filters after my filter runs.

I think I tried adding to the repository and nothing happened but I’ll try again.

[@_ck_ Participant 17 years, 5 months ago]

Weirdness. I will have to explore and test some more.

Can you tell me what other plugins you are using that are common to both sites? It almost has to be a plugin conflict at this point.

Does it let you post other forbidden html like <hr> ?