[John James Jacoby]

You really shouldn’t have one WordPress installation inside another. That’s a recipe for exactly the kind of disaster you’re experiencing, since it’s most likely conflicting .htaccess files trumping each other.

“Running nested WP installs” is different than “Running WP in a subdirectory” because of exactly what I mentioned above. If you install WP in a subdirectory, it won’t care where it is (or what its path is) as long as you install WP correctly. Once you nest several installations on top of each other, you’re setting yourself up for headaches unless you’re able to fluently track down and alleviate the rewrite issues you’ll run into.

An important piece of missing information, do both of the WordPress installs work independently without bbPress activated on either of them? Pretty permalinks turned on, on both, etc… Once you get that to behave first, then it’s time to try adding things into them.

[John James Jacoby]

You really shouldn’t have one WordPress installation inside another. That’s a recipe for exactly the kind of disaster you’re experiencing, since it’s most likely conflicting .htaccess files trumping each other.

“Running nested WP installs” is different than “Running WP in a subdirectory” because of exactly what I mentioned above. If you install WP in a subdirectory, it won’t care where it is (or what its path is) as long as you install WP correctly. Once you nest several installations on top of each other, you’re setting yourself up for headaches unless you’re able to fluently track down and alleviate the rewrite issues you’ll run into.

An important piece of missing information, do both of the WordPress installs work independently without bbPress activated on either of them? Pretty permalinks turned on, on both, etc… Once you get that to behave first, then it’s time to try adding things into them.

[John James Jacoby]

The regular bbPress installation won’t do that without much, much work.

For example, here at bbPress.org, we have 1 unified theme, that both the blog and the forums use. It’s a completely custom theme, on top of a very complicated installation that integrates with shared user tables over at wordpress.org, several themes and plugin repositories, etc…

So, it can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be, but the plugin version of bbPress will give you a huge head start.

[John James Jacoby]

The regular bbPress installation won’t do that without much, much work.

For example, here at bbPress.org, we have 1 unified theme, that both the blog and the forums use. It’s a completely custom theme, on top of a very complicated installation that integrates with shared user tables over at wordpress.org, several themes and plugin repositories, etc…

So, it can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be, but the plugin version of bbPress will give you a huge head start.

[John James Jacoby]

@ryan – Can you try visiting the Settings > Forums screen, and saving your settings again after you’ve changed your permalinks? I wonder if the rewrite rules aren’t being flushed correctly.

Could you also

global $wp_rewrite; var_dump( $wp_rewrite );

somewhere, so I can see what it thinks it should be looking for?

[John James Jacoby]

@anointed – Excited to see what you come up with. I know you’re quite familiar with BuddyPress, so hopefully you’ll 1.) feel comfortable and see the similarities, and 2.) see how bbPress has improved on those similarities, and see what’s going back into BuddyPress.

[John James Jacoby]

You’ll want to use the bbPress plugin with some custom template files, and customize it to taste. Anything is possible.

[John James Jacoby]

You’ll want to use the bbPress plugin with some custom template files, and customize it to taste. Anything is possible.

[John James Jacoby]

@anointed

add_filter( 'bbp_template_include', 'foo' );

function foo( $file ) { return 'forum.php'; }

All of the funky theme compatibility bits are at the bottom of bbp-general-template.php.

[John James Jacoby]

@tooltrainer – I’d ask if you have this much going on, that you probably create your own topic to post things in. To be honest, I can’t really keep up with everything you’re trying to do, so I don’t really know what to tell you.

I’d suggest just starting completely over from scratch, and comparing the two installs to see what’s different.

@Rick – Even if you get your old forums converted into the new plugin, BuddyPress still hasn’t been updated to integrate with the plugin version of bbPress, so your group forums either need to stay how they are, or you need to build what eventually will be in BuddyPress core.

[John James Jacoby]

@tooltrainer – that’s the price you pay for having something so customized. In the future any custom plugins won’t be able to drop in, and will all need customization. You’re sacrificing ease of use to have something totally unique. You need to ask yourself if you want to keep babysitting your site whenever anything outside of your control gets updated, or if you can make things work with something you have less control over.

Regarding converting from stand alone to plugin, make sure you have a solid backup and restore plan incase something goes wrong.

Regarding theme comparability, bbPress defaults to using the page.php of your theme and replacing the title and the content with what bbPress expects to be there. If your custom theme has page.php all tricked out, you’ll want to find/hire a developer to show you how to bypass it.

Eventually we’ll have a codex here with examples, similar to codex.wordpress.org, until then it’s up to you early adopters to go hunting for solutions and post them up in the forums, for everyone to learn from. I’ve tried to dream up every possible way for things to be filtered and manipulated with this version of bbPress, so you should never need change anything in the core files.

[John James Jacoby]

bbp_exclude_forum_ids()

is used all through-out the bbPress plugin to exclude the forum id’s that the currently logged in user doesn’t have the capabilities to view. This includes forums, topics, replies, everything. So, I wouldn’t consider the fact that it’s doing what you want it to do, a fix. It’s just masking a bigger underlying condition.

[John James Jacoby]

Also, you shouldn’t need to use your franken-theme anymore. bbPress comes with some pretty cool theme compatibility now. Make sure you *don’t* have

add_theme_support( 'bbpress' );

in your custom theme, and bbPress *should* still work and fill in the blanks. You’ll just need to style your CSS to taste.

As an example, http://testbp.org/discussion/ is using the standard bp-default BuddyPress theme, with no template files moved or shifted around. bbPress is just putting itself where it thinks it should be. I’m using some short-codes on the front page to display everything, and some custom CSS to make it match a little more nicely.

[John James Jacoby]

Check and make sure you’re using the new

bbp_current_user_can_access_create_topic_form()

and

bbp_current_user_can_create_topic_in_forum()

functions.

They consolidate a bunch of complicated logic that doesn’t belong in the template files. They are used in the bbp-twentyten/bbpress/form-topic.php template file.

[John James Jacoby]

Are you setting forums as private/hidden?

[John James Jacoby]

@tooltrainer – Custom theme, or using bbp-twentyten? Possible it’s a custom theme and you’re not checking caps correctly?

Check bbp-includes/bbp-caps.php. It relies on meta capabilities to match up bbPress caps with WordPress caps. If you altered the core caps for specific core WP roles, they could be all wacky. Also, caps are stored per user, and per role, so if you adjusted them in the middle of a live site, you might have some users with different caps than others.

[John James Jacoby]

@tooltrainer – It’s some kind of capability issue. Do you have any custom plugins that are modifying your capabilities? Is there anything special about your installation that would help identify what’s going on?

[John James Jacoby]

Does /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/bbp-themes/bbp-twentyten/style.css exist?

No need to move files around.

Don’t worry, it’s actually more common than you might think to get the two confused.

[John James Jacoby]

Most likely not going to happen. We have an entire forum for showing off installations. Give that a look.

https://bbpress.org/forums/forum/pimp-your-press

[John James Jacoby]

Most likely not going to happen. We have an entire forum for showing off installations. Give that a look.

https://bbpress.org/forums/forum/pimp-your-press

[John James Jacoby]

Kind of a long story, but more cliffnotes…

BuddyPress is a social networking plugin for WordPress, that actually comes bundled with bbPress inside of it to create group discussion forums.

bbPress has always been a stand-alone platform (like WordPress) but is being turned into a plugin for WordPress to make integration as seamless as possible. So right now, there are two distinctly separate versions of bbPress, stand-alone and plugin.

As far as I know there isn’t a migration script between SMF and bbPress, but I could be wrong. There most likely is not one for the bbPress plugin since it hasn’t been publicly released yet.

Documentation, is limited. There is almost none on the plugin so far, but there will be once it’s released and in the wild. We’ll put some documentation up here at bbpress.org to help answer all of these kinds of questions easier.

[John James Jacoby]

Kind of a long story, but more cliffnotes…

BuddyPress is a social networking plugin for WordPress, that actually comes bundled with bbPress inside of it to create group discussion forums.

bbPress has always been a stand-alone platform (like WordPress) but is being turned into a plugin for WordPress to make integration as seamless as possible. So right now, there are two distinctly separate versions of bbPress, stand-alone and plugin.

As far as I know there isn’t a migration script between SMF and bbPress, but I could be wrong. There most likely is not one for the bbPress plugin since it hasn’t been publicly released yet.

Documentation, is limited. There is almost none on the plugin so far, but there will be once it’s released and in the wild. We’ll put some documentation up here at bbpress.org to help answer all of these kinds of questions easier.

[John James Jacoby]

Right now probably the best example of the plugin in action is over at http://testbp.org/discussion. It’s using some of the shortcodes and minimal CSS tweaks to mimic the look of the forums here at bbpress.org.

[John James Jacoby]

Right now probably the best example of the plugin in action is over at http://testbp.org/discussion. It’s using some of the shortcodes and minimal CSS tweaks to mimic the look of the forums here at bbpress.org.

[John James Jacoby]

The bbPress plugin will fully integrate into any existing WordPress 3.1+ installation. Since it’s using WordPress to power the database interaction, it is immediately integrated and available in any way you need it to be, depending on your level of skill, etc…

Technically WordPress doesn’t really have conventional ‘profiles’ but they do use the exact same user account for everything. In the future bbPress profiles will be merged with BuddyPress profiles, providing a seamless experience.

You’re on your own with advertisements.

Other things of note:

* The stand alone version of bbPress has been in a feature freeze for a majority of the past two years.

* The community surrounding bbPress isn’t as large as WordPress.

* The transition between versions (0.9, 1.0, and now the plugin) have caused some unrest for people passionate about the project.

So, that’s the cliff-notes of the story.