[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

I didn’t change the whole forum to look like bbprress.org, but instead wanted the first page users see to look like .org. That is, with a forum list on the left, tag cloud below that and on the right a list of recent topic updates. I achieved that with the following page code:

<div style="display: inline; float: left; position: relative; width: 400px;">

<div style="margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; outline: 0; font-size: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">

<h2>Forums</h2>

[bbp-forum-index]

</div>

<div style="margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; outline: 0; font-size: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">

<h2>Hot Tags</h2>

[bbp-topic-tags]

</div>

</div>

<div style="display: inline; float: left; position: relative; width: 400px; margin-left: 25px;">

<h2>Topics<span><a title="New Forum Topic" href="http://your-url-here/?page_id=232" style="font-weight: normal;"> — Start New</a></span></h2>[bbp-topic-index]</div>

I also made some CSS changes to change formatting and remove some text.

Jon

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

Jim,

What I mainly wanted was a web page where the layout was similar to the bbpress.org forum and I wasn’t looking for the colours, etc, to look the same. I have found that a new theme isn’t required and instead I did the following:

1. Create a new page in wordpress

2. Create a layout using <DIV> tags and use bbPress shortcodes to specify where the forum components should sit

3. I then added CSS to the style.css of my WordPress child theme to control how the forum looked. For example, I didn’t want the forum navigation text or the text saying how many posts there are, etc, so I turned them off via CSS.

I’m not sure if that’s the best way to do what I wanted but once I “discovered” shortcodes this was all very simple and didn’t require a new theme or PHP changes, etc, so was fairly easy.

Let me know if you want any more details about what I did and I post them here.

Jon

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

I’m still hacking around and have just discovered shortcodes…they do some of what I wanted and, for example, can give a similar *layout* to the .org page. Still want to change some of the way the content looks, e.g. remove the navigation path above the forums and topics lists (is that possible without a theme or code change?), and I guess that may require a theme or code change but I’ll keep investigating.

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks guys, really appreciate you taking the time to reply. That answered the question…I wanted to know how I could make some changes to the layout to achieve things I have seen on other sites and it appears a theme is the answer.

I am more than happy to learn and get my hands dirty as suggested, but really need documentation for that because I don’t have time to work out how this all works by looking through the code. However, that’s absolutely no criticism and I am well aware of how long it takes to create documentation.

Thanks again for your replies and for creating this plugin.

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

jaredatch, thanks for that. However, I assume/hope that the look of the bbpress site is to do with the theme you are using, etc, and not because it is version 1.x because it looks so much better than 2.x. Hopefully the bbpress site won’t end up looking like what comes with 2.x when you upgrade!

I still don’t get this though. I’m searching Google for ‘free bbpress themes’ as suggested above and all but one of them on the first page of results has been for bbpress 1.x and not 2. All I want to do is make some basic changes to the layout of the forum but I have spent more time trying to understand where to start with bbp than in setting up all the rest of my wp site.

I know bbp relies on volunteers, but some documentation, examples and a better standard theme would really help us new users and perhaps it would be worth getting that right before further new features are added. Not a criticism but just a thought.

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks, I’ll have a look at themes.

I know my way around wordpress and was confident I could accomplish something with bbpress but am rapidly losing faith given the lack of documentation and examples for bbpress!!

Given how good the bbpress site looks, if that is done with a theme then it would be a good idea to make that theme (or similar) available. Even better if bbpress used something impressive “out of the box”.

I’m off to find some themes…

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks for that. I assumed a theme just covers the look and feel of a site but does it change the layout, etc, too?

For example, on the https://bbpress.org/forums page the layout is totally different to the default – there is a list of forums on the left, a search box and list of tags below that and on the right is a list of recent topics. The columns included in the topic and forums list are different to normal too and above the topics list there is a “start new” link. Those are the sort of changes I want to make. I know CSS but can’t see how I change all that through CSS or will a new theme do more than change CSS?

Sorry for asking such basic questions but while BBPress seems great it is a bit impenetrable for the newbie!

Thanks,

Jon

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

Good question and I’m struggling with this too. The bbpress.org site looks great but the default install is very different. I don’t mind doing the work to make the changes but having looked through the forum and what documentation there is I still don’t know where to start. Can anyone give any pointers as to the sort of things used on the bbpress.org site so implementers can use this on their sites?

Jon

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

Hi,

See the following forum topic for details of the issue and the fix:

[help] Link Log out error after bbPress installed

Jon

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

I found this is a known issue logged in Ticket #1645.

The fix is to edit the following file:

bbp-includes/bbp-common-functions.php

Line 1074 should be changed from:

$redirect_to = home_url( isset( $_SERVER ) ? $_SERVER : ” );

To:

$redirect_to = ( is_ssl() ? ‘https://&#8217; : ‘http://&#8217; ) . $_SERVER . $_SERVER;

That fix worked for me.

Hopefully this will be included in the official release soon.

Jon

[@dorsetjon Member 12 years, 9 months ago]

Hi,

This issue is also reported in:

Logout error when bbPress plugin is active

The fix in that topic didn’t work for me and bbPress consistently causes an additional directory name to be included in the logout URL.

Is there a fix for this?

Thanks,

Jon