You uploaded the wrong version of bbPress to your plugins folder. bbPress 1.1 is a stand alone installation, and bbPress 2.0 and above are plugins for WordPress.
Hello! bbPress comes with a bunch of built in support for a majority of standard WordPress themes. If bbPress isn’t working with your theme, it’s up to your theme author to decide if bbPress is something they want to support.
You shouldn’t need to do much more to get bbPress to look and work like the forums you linked to, once you get your theme sorted.
Great thoughts and great feedback. All the issues you raise are totally valid.
I deleted your cross-post over at WordPress.org. There may be two different audiences, but your opinions are directed mostly towards the development of the project, so this is the best place to talk about that.
It’s amazingly simple to point out the places where bbPress can be improved. It’s also amazingly difficult to dedicate oneself to volunteering on a daily basis. Break this very long topic down into smaller, more manageable topics, and create trac tickets as enhancements for the new features you’d like to see. Then others can pick which line-item they are interested in helping with, and focus on it.
There’s a lot of love and attention that goes into bbPress, even though it may not seem like it on the site itself. If you want to be part of the solution, come hang out in #bbpress on freenode on IRC. It’d be great to have you start working on fixing some of these issues with me.
Yes they are custom post types.
Something custom will need to be coded up. Nothing exists for bbPress that I’m aware of.
If you can point me to a more specific problem, a plugin, a specific issue, I’m happy to help. 
You probably don’t want to edit the files directly. You should be able to limp by with a few CSS edits.
None of it really makes any sense. When we have a moment to all dig in deeper, I’d like to access someone’s installation directly to look into it.
That’s pretty intense. Seems like some other CSS is getting in the way.
If there are places where bbPress is not busting the cache properly, I’ll need your help to figure out where and why. bbPress currently relies heavily on WordPress’s API’s to do this for us. bbPress runs very few manual queries of its own, and new or edited posts should be busting the cache automatically.
Glad you approve. I think it’s an improvement over 2.0, and about as good as it can get for now.
Working on the BuddyPress Groups. Opponent right now. Probably a beta soon, to test some things I’m trying out.
Permissions issue on one of your plugins folders. Google what the perms should be and how to repair them. Should be relatively straight forward.
I felt the same way at first when I found WordPress, but check out how the functions work and what you can pass into them. Most of them accept a before and after attribute so you can customize the output.
I’m working on something for bbPress core in 2.1. Right now there’s no easy way to get a post count without querying the posts table directly every time. It’ll store counts in user meta and keep things in sync.
If you absolutely must have a page there, you’ll want to use Shortcodes or a custom page template of your coding to customize it.
Awful spammy to bump a 5 year old topic. Closing.
You’ll probably need to hook a custom function ithat you create nto one of the actions in the template files, depending on where you want the code to appear.
Don’t use the Shortcodes, just use the widget already supplied by bbPress.
It looks like the CSS just isn’t being included at all. Does your theme use wp_head();
Probably easiest to stick with what you have, at least for your users. Eventually the bbPress 2 templates and styling will take over forums entirely, and you’ll have the option to migrate your existing forums over, which will be strongly recommended.
bbPress 2.1 will come with support for the WordPress visual editor.
BuddyPress uses the activity stream component to accomplish this. You could use it, and bbPress will work with it.
Probably something our of wack filter wise. Possible autop is missing or unhooked.
Will need way more specific information to be of any help. Links to sites, versions of WordPress/bbPress, etc…
