[kevinjohngallagher]

I never really liked the Nissan one when you linked ot it previously, but your new URL is really great, and very well done. Congratulations and thanks for sharing with us!

[kevinjohngallagher]

I absolutely agree that this is far from a “guarenteed” fix, but I’ve long found that the more things we can rule out when going through a bbPress to WordPress integration the easier life becomes.

For example, I still define the following in my WordPress config file:

define(‘AUTH_KEY’, ‘authkey’);

define(‘SECURE_AUTH_KEY’, ‘secureauthkey’);

define(‘SECURE_AUTH_SALT’, ‘secureauthsalt’);

define(‘LOGGED_IN_KEY’, ‘loggedinkey’);

define(‘LOGGED_IN_SALT’, ‘loggedinsalt’);

define(‘SECRET_KEY’, ‘secretkey’);

define(‘SECRET_SALT’, ‘secretsalt’);

define(‘NONCE_KEY’,’nonce_key’);

define(‘NONCE_SALT’, ‘nonce_salte’);

define(‘COOKIE_DOMAIN’, ”);

define(‘COOKIEPATH’, ‘/’);

define(‘CUSTOM_USER_TABLE’, ‘wp_users’);

define(‘CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE’, ‘wp_usermeta’);

And the following in my bbPress config file:

define(‘BB_AUTH_KEY’, ‘authkey’);

define(‘BB_SECURE_AUTH_KEY’, ‘secureauthkey’);

define(‘BB_SECURE_AUTH_SALT’, ‘secureauthsalt’);

define(‘BB_LOGGED_IN_KEY’, ‘loggedinkey’);

define(‘BB_LOGGED_IN_SALT’, ‘loggedinsalt’);

define(‘BB_SECRET_KEY’, ‘secretkey’);

define(‘BB_SECRET_SALT’, ‘secretsalt’);

define(‘BB_NONCE_KEY’,’nonce_key’);

define(‘BB_NONCE_SALT’, ‘nonce_salte’);

$bb->wp_siteurl = ‘http://www.mydomain.com/’;

$bb->wp_home = ‘http://www.mydomain.com/’;

$bb->wp_table_prefix = ‘wp_’;

$bb->user_bbdb_name = ‘XXXXX’;

$bb->user_bbdb_user = ‘XXXXX’;

$bb->user_bbdb_password = ‘XXXXX’;

$bb->user_bbdb_host = ‘localhost’;

$bb->custom_user_table = ”;

$bb->custom_user_meta_table = ”;

$bb->authcookie = ‘wordpress_’;

$bb->cookiedomain = ”;

$bb->cookiepath = ‘/’;

$bb->sitecookiepath = ”;

$bb->wp_table_prefix = ‘wp_’;

Now I know that most of that code is redundant, and left over from older integration methods; but by using this as a base that I know works for bbPress0.9/1.0.2 to WP2.5->2.9 I’ve found that I’ve not hit any real integration issues that weren’t procedural or human error in over a year.

Adding “AddHandler php5-script .php” to my .htaccess file wont cause any overhead (as i should be using PHP5 anyway), and will also help rule out that 1 out of 100 times that installation/integration hits an issue.

@Zaerl and Chris

PHP4 to 5 was a huge change, a leap into correctly written OOP.

bbPress1.0.2 (for all its faults) and specifically backPress are really brilliantly written OOP code; and while not 100% sure, i’m quietly confident that using backPress/bbPress1.0.2 on PHP4 would throw some inconsistances.

I doubt this fix is anywhere near “guarenteed” to solve anything, but if it works for 1 out of 100 people, it should go in the “win” column

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Transmutator,

Question – Why not simply make bbPress themes/templates function like WordPress themes?

They do.

The ease of theming bbPress is one of it’s real strong points.

The problem is that you’re confusing some of the phrases (its not your fault, its not brilliantly clear unless you’ve been here a while).

Integration = bbPress + WordPress using same cookies for log on.

Deep Integration = bbPress loading WordPress every time, allowing access to WordPress code.

So when you say “fully integrate” i’m guessing you mean “deep integration” which isn’t supported or intended. We can offer some advice on it, but its a by product, not a feature.

The realism is that copying large sections of your theme (mostly the ‘outer’ sections such as header and footer) and your current WP stylesheet will start to make a huge difference to how your bbPress theme looks. Just make sure to remove any “wordpress” specific code or plugin calls; they’re really superfluous to 99% of forums.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I never knew that.

I suppose it’s another quirk we could add in to be on the safe side.

Nice one Driz and Gerikg (btw Gerikg, i sent 3 people to your site yesterday to use your walkthrough – well done mate its really good).

[kevinjohngallagher]

EvilGeek,

Respectfully, I apologise for suggesting that you were going to use that website with the spamming script on it, and I change my degoratory to a mere suggestion that linking to a email spam website is a poor idea. Anyway…

I notice you still havent said please. How awesome of you – people will queue up to work I’m sure.

And for the record, I have Signatures working for 1.0.2 on my only 1.0.2 install.

But I LOVE that you’ve not given us any error messages or set up information or really anything that could help us help you. Just saying “aint workin”, wow, thats SO much information, i don’t know where to start…

[kevinjohngallagher]

EvilGeek,

With all due respect, what basic features we had working in 0.9 still work in 1.0. bbPress 1.0 didn’t take-away/change any of the basic features in the core; if anything it added to them slightly. Yes ther are basic forum features that bbPress doesn’t have, but then it’s never had them.

I doubt anyone will convert the plugins you need for free because 1) if they wanted to they would have done so already, 2) you’ve only been part of the project for 1 week and 3) You didn’t say please (manners count for alot)!

You could pay for someone to convert them for you, but that would be a separate request, and would be time consuming (and possibly/probably expensive).

Also, please don’t bump your thread, especially as you bumped it 2 minutes after you last posted, thats just stooopid – this forum aint that busy

And finally, its not for me to be anyone else’s moral voice, but man, thats a poor assed website; with the sole purpose of sending spam email.

[kevinjohngallagher]

A sarcasm, how wonderful.

Email for new posts in WP is different because, drumroll please, a forum and a blog are different things !!! They work differently, both from an end user and an administrator point of view.

Not to mention, and I know this one is hard to accept, but WordPress has been around for 7 years, has had 17 released, has a core development team of over 10 people with 100s of others submitting patches and code snippets per release and recieved $29million of VC funding last year… while bbPress has been around for 3 years, has had 4 releases, has 0 developers and less than a handfull of people submitting patches/code and ofcourse has 0 money.

Really, I’m all for sarcasm to make a point. But try and hold off on it until you can either a) make a good point or b) have joined the website for more than a day.

Oh, and just an FYI, when people like ZAERL who give up their time to help YOU with your question, if you bother to reply (and you should) maybe, just maybe… say THANK YOU. You might have heard of it, its this new fangled thing kids are calling “manners”, hopefully it’ll catch on. Oh no, wait…

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Glenn,

I’d take a deep breathe and read my article “Basic versus Standard”:

http://www.kevinjohngallagher.com/2010/02/25/basic-versus-standard/

Not that it’s an ideal fit, but it covers the basics (pun intended) that I think alot of people new to bbPress should have an understanding of. bbPress has the very bare minimum of basic features; that is features that are required to make the forum software actually work like a forum.

It has very very few standard features, which are on the whole based on personal perception, effectively what we each individually consider ‘most’ or other forums to have.

For your goodself, admin notification would be one of these features that you think should be included. I can’t say that in my 2 years of using bbPress I’ve ever missed that as a feature (although i’m kinda sure that bbPress 0.9 had new user email notification – but i turned it off very quickly).

bbPress has alot of positives, really loads. Very few of those are features that the community consider standard.

Take Care,

Kev

[kevinjohngallagher]

There’s a few ways to do this, and probably using .htaccess would be the best, but i think you’re overlooking a rather more simple solution.

Why not just change the “front-page.php” file in your theme to be a static list of forums? I did that on one of mine and it made alot of difference and a quick fix

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Gibby,

Your best bet would be to take this over to the BuddyPress folks.

The bbPress you see inside BuddyPress is actually a hack/modified version of the core (a very very good one mind you); but really you’ll have more chance of getting a good answer other there.

Good Luck,

Kev

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Amwilson,

Always glad to hear someone thinking through using bbPress to see if it fits their needs.

bbpress appears to integrate with buddyppress

It doesn’t. Well, kinda.

Basically, it doesn’t. BuddyPress uses a large hack of bbPress (it removes almost all the work in the bbPress1.0.2 backend). They do look similar, and work simialr, and share some code… but the bbPress/forum you see in BuddyPress is fundamentally different.

Basically, any changes to bbPress (haha) will not appear in BuddyPress unless one of the BuddyPress team takes the time to manuall convert/hack them. That said, the BuddyPress team seem on the ball with this sort of thing.

how should I set bbpress up now before it becomes a plugin to make the transition better when it does become a plugin?

We have no idea. bbPress becoming a plugin of WordPress was ‘announced’ in the middle of an IRC chat by Matt with no warning or explanation. Its never been written in a forum post or a blog post, and we have no other information other than Matt posting that “I just want to quit the whole project” 2 months ago.

At this point in time, none of us have any information and the ‘weekly’ IRC chats and Blog posts haven’t happened in 14 weeks; so spending anytime thinking about making life easier down the line is going ot be fruitless. We’re all clueless.

Should I set it up to use my wordpress database or give bbpress its own database? I am not sure if the separate database will be an option after it is a plugin

Having the same database makes integration a bucket load easier.

I’d presume that would be the same when bbPress becomes a plugin.

Is it simple to import simple:press data to bbpress?

There are a few hacks for converting forums to bbPress on these boards. Paul Hawke has written a few and they seem to get good reviews. You’ll have to do a search though to see if Simple Press is included, but Paul’s threads and code is definately the place to start.

If so I may just use simple:press for now until bbpress becomes a plugin

Just a heads up, bbPress 0.9 to 1.0 had a full time paid developer from Automattic, and it took 14 months to be released with virtually no feature improvements. bbPress 1.1 has taken 10 months to develop, and we’re no where near realease ready.

bbPress as a WP plugin, even if we all stopped work on bbPress1.1 and focussed on that, wouldn’t be ready this year.

=============================

My big advice is to make a list of the feautres you want your forum to have, and post them here and see if bbPress can meet those needs. If it can, awesome. If it can’t – better to find out now

[kevinjohngallagher]

email – kevinjohngallagher.com

Good work Zaerl

[kevinjohngallagher]

@EvilGeek23

No.

@Brucini

There is no way to downgrade from bbPress1.0 to bbPress0.9.

And you’re right that with a little knowledge you can convert 0.9 plugins to 1.0 plugins

@Dragunoff

bbPress integration is not something the folks releasing WordPress are fussed about.

bbPress0.9 is only meant to integrate with WP2.5 and 2.6. There is a hack/plugin to let it integrate with WP2.7; and so far that has been reported to work for 2.8 and 2.9 but it’s not designed with that in mind.

We’ll see what happens with WP3.0, and if the current plugin/hack continutes to work, but i severly doubt it will. Either way, i’d not worry about the beta too much, and I’d def suggest holding off upgrading WP3.0 until at least WP3.0.1 anyway.

[kevinjohngallagher]

It is possible, but honestly, its probably not worth the hassle.

You either connect to the WP database yourself to test (no integration required), but that can be a bit hit and miss – especially with child themes etc.

Or you use deep integration to test for the current theme. Which is simple as long as you have deep integration working (which in itself is very hit and miss).

Bluntly, unless you had a very good reason to do this (and you might, you’ve been v helpful with bbPress recently mate) I’d not take on the challenge. But if you want pointers and some code, lets start a new thread

[kevinjohngallagher]

Ah, was about to come and answer that one.

It’s a relly great plugin, and a lovely bit of coding from _ck_.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m always wary of website with premium themes that refuse to show screen shots or link to a demo; or that are selling them from a website thats just a rushed out wordpress install (complete with the “Hello World!” blog post still being the only one there).

I’m not doubting the validity of the theme or it’s value, it may be awesome and totally worth the money, it’s just I’d rather see the theme itself than a text based flash movie telling me that it’s great.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Use 0.9 if you can.

There’s very few improvements in the 1.0.2 code for your average forum use, and if you need the features from plugins that are not 1.0 compatible it’s your best bet.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I think i can shed a little light on this, but apologies if i’m off a little.

1) you need to decide if you want to have parent/child relationships with categories or not. If you want categories, then all forums need to have a parent category. Its a world of hassle otherwise.

2) bbPress doesn’t actually handle in any way shape or form a parent / child relationship. Its key to remember this when processing the data, especially in the bb_forums() loop. Remember it’s just a plain list of names with no corrolation.

3) The “category” is not marked on the forum list or forum database table where you can query it easily as a 1 to 1 relationship. Instead, a hack of _CK_’s forum as a category plugin for bbPress 0.8/0.9 has been rolled into the core. Thats not a complaint against Sam, its the fact that it doesn’t solve the problem, it merely “fakes” a category to the end user.

4) bbPress doesn’t consider a category to be in a Parent/Child relationship, it considers a category to be one that topics cant be written to AND that has a child forum. So if down the line you make a forum read only for some reason – bbPress will think its a category.

Here is a long (sorry) post I wrote about it in September 2008:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/parent-childrelationship-in-forum-loop

And in the end I made this as an example:

http://kevinjohngallagher.com/___alpha/bbpress_as_phpbb/

Basically, I had to do a major rewrite of the bb_forums() loop.

[kevinjohngallagher]

There’s a more fundamental issue here.

Basically, you should ensure that every forum has a parent category. It solves so many issues when building themes and dealing with the loop. I covered this in my “bbPress as phpBB” theme back in 2008. I’ll hunt out the links for you. It was simple, but a bit of a pain.

[kevinjohngallagher]

In fairness Yuri, while I’m unhappy at the way Matt has left bbPress, he is incredibly busy and recieves a crazy amount of email due to him being the effective face of the company.

Maybe you should have waited for a response instead of hounding him.

who are this people and why we can’t find them?

“We” is “you” mate. I used this thing called Google (or at least that is what the kids are calling it) and found this:

… documentation team has been put together comprised of Tom39Away, pmall, justintadlock, and Nightgunner5 …

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/documentation-team

https://bbpress.org/blog/2009/12/2009-12-09-meetup/

Things with bbPress aren’t great. No-one is pretending they are. But they’ve not been great for well over a year now, and frankly its not going to change anytime soon. Lets just focus on getting 1.1 (or 1.0.3 – not sue when people started using different numbers) out the door, dealing with all the fall out of WordPress3.0 not integrating; and then we can take stock and see where we are.

Hounding Matt, or anyone from automattic, isn’t going to make the smallest difference I’m afraid.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Back from my holidays and hopefully ramping up some bbPress dev in the next week or so, and this looks like a nice thread to come back to

The thing that I think a few folks have missed out on, is that the biggest changes from bbPress 0.9 to bbPress 1.0 is that alot of the core functions of the backend were unified into BackPress. While this added bloat to be sure, it basically gave us a unified platform on which ‘all’ of the automattic software solutions would be based. Except… none of the others moved to BackPress.

So we don’t have any (to the best of my knowledge) WordPress functions in bbPress, but also with “deep integration” we’re loading multiple classes and functions that effectively do the same thing. With deep integration we duplicate all of the base calls and functions every time we load a page.

BuddyPress got round this by ripping out all of the backpress stuff, and making the bbPress functions call the WordPress functions. BuddyPress’ forum is based on bbPress, its isn’t bbPress. This is where Sam kind of got the short end of the stick. Had WordPress moved to BackPress (instead of porting WP changes into BackPress) then all of the Automattic software solutions would be on the same base platform, and integration between them all would be a doddle. It also would have meant that bbPress could be both a stand alone AND a plugin, as it would effectively be a large “module” on top of BackPress functions.

The realsim is, that without any form of Project Management (and i know that phrase is where people start to hate me) or cohersion between the Automattic projects or developers and contributors, we’re effectively going to go in circles here.

Today marks the 3rd Month with no blog post or communication (other than the infamous “I just want to quit the whole project” statement from Matt). As much as that is disheartening, its not a shock. Matt (the person) and Matt (the developer) and those he works with on these projects have their hands full right now; and from what I’ve seen Chris has continued to steady the ship in a wonderful fashion… but make no mistake we’re drifting aimlessly in the current direction. Lets just keep the ship afloat, try and fix some bugs, and we’ll see what happens when we’re closer to a release.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful afternoon.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I personally use the PHP class found at http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/.

include(‘mobile_device_detect.php’);

$mobile = mobile_device_detect();

if(!mobile)

{

//echo TinyMCE code

}

I had this as a plugin on bbProgress, but i see they’ve even shut their doors (no more message on front page). I’ll try and boot up my old dev machine and find it as a plugin when i get home

[kevinjohngallagher]

I personally have no issue with Matt, or any of the other Automattic folks, focussing on the WP3.0 release (or any of the other balls they’re juggling) just now. Also i totally understand that any form of communication on these forums from Matt, or any of the other Automattic folks, leads to a rush of posting from people both on and off topic but… Leaving it with “I just want to quit the whole project” is somewhat poor.

That aside, i’ll be home first week in April, if we want to have an IRC meeting, can see where we’re up to etc. It appears that Gautam and a few others have submitted a number of patches in my first few weeks away.

Take Care folks

[kevinjohngallagher]

As you’re on the forums Marius… Any chance of telling us if this code we’ve given you does work?

Maybe even throw out a “thank you”, but I realise that’s asking a bit much, we’ll be happy for you to just give us feedback on the code that we’ve written for you to solve your problem.

Thanks in advance for showing some manners

Kev

[kevinjohngallagher]

Thankfully, i came up with a cunning solution.

It’s a new thing some of the kids are using, called Google. I know, it might never catch on, but it’s worth a shot…

New bbPress Theme: Black-Letterhead

http://ulyssesonline.com/blackletterhead/

BBPress Theme

Now it appears that the theme has been removed entirely, but i’d suggest contacting the Author via his website. It’s a 2 year old theme that really just changes a few colours, so they’ve probably just forgotten about it.

That said, the theme has been updated for WordPress so there is every chance that the code you need has just been rolled into one.

Either way, it’s a good place to start

Good Luck