I just ran through and did a brand new install of WordPress with Twenty Fourteen as the theme, only plugins are bbPress and BuddyPress. It appears to have worked. I wiped the plugins, and tried again with no luck. Here’s a rundown of my process:
Permalinks set to postname.
bbPress installed first, forum root url set to ‘sound-off-forums’, saved. All other settings left default.
Page created with slug ‘sound-off-forums’, page works, shows forums as expected.
BuddyPress installed, default configuration left alone. ‘http://example.com/sound-off-forums’ fails to load, showing a 404 page.
I have no idea. It sounds like I’ll likely need to scrub the DB any trace of bbpress and buddypress from my environment and start over. Thanks for the help with everything. It must have just been an installation error.
I’ve tried the things listed, and compared it exactly as we’ve run through. I currently have the buddypress legacy forums turned off as it’s a new install, but I took a shot and disabled buddypress. It completely resolves the issue. A clean install breaks it again. I’m not sure what it is that out-of-the-box would break it like that, but it appears there is a conflict between BuddyPress 2.0 and bbPress 2.5.3.
Alright. Let me run through this one more time to see if I’m overlooking something. My real world scenario uses the page http://example.com/sound-off-forum as the page I want to use from wordpress. The slug is set to sound-off-forum, as that is the url I’d like to use, and each is the desired url for my forum.
Page is visible here: https://i.imgur.com/Eiz8xyL.png
Admin panel view: https://i.imgur.com/DL3MXzj.png
I then set the forum root to “sound-off-forum” and get this result
bbPress Error: https://i.imgur.com/rp7yLGF.png
http://example.com/sound-off-forum page no longer working: http://imgur.com/3b314S3
I keep trying this method, and every time I get the result “Possible BuddyPress Conflict” and then the page (in this case http://example.com/discuss) returns page not found.
Doing so breaks the page. It creates a conflict by attempting to dynamically generate a forum root, using the same url as the wordpress page which is using the shortcode.
