Hey Detective, thanks for the code snipet. I checked out your site and I see it on your sidebar in the forums but not on your main WP sidebar? BTW, nice looking site. 
I just downloaded Firefox w/Firebug and looking at the message it appears to be related to another plug-in I am using. Otherwise I think it works fine, but it’s looking like more customization than I want to do right now for those behaviors I was talking about. I think I’ll just stick with what I have, but thanks to both for your help! I’ll provide a link to my site once it’s live, right now it’s kind of a mess. 
Thanks fel64, that did it, sort of… I inserted the line at the end of my wp-config.php file and that allows me to call the login_form() PHP function from bbPress from within WP. The page loads fine except I do get an error message at the bottom of my browser (using IE 7) that says, “Done, but with errors on page”. I think this means there’s a javascript error somewhere? No idea where to start looking for this. Any thoughts?
Also, it doesn’t quite work as desired since when you do anything with the login form it redirects you to the forums which makes sense but not the behavior I want. I think I may forego any further modifications for now but I like the idea of the deeper integration between WP and bbPress. If I can figure out the error I may be able to dabble more later as I learn more PHP.
Thanks!
Thanks for both your replies. I’d read that thread previously and my impression was that it is overly complex for what I’m trying to accomplish and was hoping for a much simpler way. I’d rather avoid having to “hack core files” as described and I want to be able to upgrade both WP and bbPress easily with changes only in my template files. I also don’t need the complex behavior of conditionally showing admin links, etc. since I just bookmark the admin page. And finally, as I mentioned, my PHP skills are non-existant at this point so not the kind of thing I am comfortable taking on right now.
fel64, currently I have my user tables and cookies integrated. I installed bbPress within the WP directory to get the easy integration described in the docs since I’m still pretty new to both. So far that seems to work great. I like your suggestion of just grabbing the HTML code for the WP login and making it look like the bbPress login. That would solve the login part of it. However, then I would need some conditional code to display different things if the user is logged in or not, similar to what the bbPress login form does. It displays the welcome and profile link if logged in, or login form if not. For new user registration I’d have to send them to the bbPress registration page because I want them to fill out profile info not available in the WP registration form since it only asks for username/pw. Then I think it would be kind of weird that the user clicks register from the home WP page and gets taken to the forums after they register. Probably have to do some special handling there to see where they came from and send them to the right place.
So…. hope you don’t mind the thinking outloud but after all that I’m wondering if it’s all worth the trouble given how unfamiliar I am with these systems. Maybe I’ll postpone this until future versions of bbPress make login integration much easier or there are plug-ins written for WP that can help. My initial thought was, why can’t I just call the login form code from bbPress from WP? Is this something that requires a deeper level of integration than what I have? I’m curious about this in general as it would be something I’d like to be able to do in the future.
Thanks!
Wow, I just tried to visit the site and it didn’t load (Using IE7). It just has a link to BrowseHappy, never heard of it. Sorry, I’m not going to switch browsers just to see your site. I’ll try and see if FireFox works when I get around to installing that, but I think it’s kind of harsh to require your users use a particular browser, especially a lesser known one. My 2c.
