[kevinjohngallagher]

” Integration only became a real “feature” of bbPress with 0.9 when it was brought front and centre during install and got it’s own admin options page.”

Yeah, but that was 8 months ago. It’s not like it’s a massive shock we’ve all just got over. 0.9 was stable 8 months ago.

“Unfortunately WordPress is a moving target and it is difficult to keep up with all it’s changes”

But in terms of a moving target mate, 1) its well documented 2) you work for the company 3) we dont need to keep up with ALL the changes, and 4) it’s been 8 months!

I know that may look like i’m labouring a point, but its more to clarify. If 0.9 nor 1.0alpha cannot integrate with wordpress 2.6 (which has had 3 betas and 4 point releases) in the last 7 months, is it even likely that we’ll get it in the next 7 months?

I, and everyone here, realises that wordpress is changeable, we accept that totally, but if what we’re saying is that BBpress will release 1 stable version ever 3 versions of wordpress (and it will only integrate with the first version) , then really, i think it’s time for me and the others to say goodbye.

“It’s a little unfair to say that bbPress isn’t usable. “

Yes, that’s true.

I think it’s best we say its… Not fit for purpose.

Let me show you how mate, with the blow coming from your own BBpress website:

“bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed”

-https://bbpress.org/

See any of my posts last month bout how web standards are not being met.

And, ease of integration, really? I’m hoping that as funny as the irony/joke of the facebook page.

“our extensive plugin system”.

-https://bbpress.org/

Half of them dont work. Most of the Authors have long since left the sinking ship. 0.9 was a milestone, and you folks all did such a stellar job; but man has the side been let down, and infact gotten alot smaller. Where would we be without _CK_?

“is highly customizable.”

– https://bbpress.org/about/

This made me laugh too. Have you ever wondered why all BBpress forums look the same? No different icons, layout, DT/DDs, OL/LIs, etc. Every single one looks like the bog standard one, with the exception of the logo and border/background colours. This either means that everyone loves their website to be identical (hmmmm, no) or maybe hardcoding alot of things into a non template-able file is actually a stupid idea.

“Easy integration with your blog.

WordPress and bbPress are siblings, and they get along together “

– https://bbpress.org/about/features/

*cough*

“bbPress integration should work with most recent version of WordPress”

– https://bbpress.org/documentation/integration-with-wordpress/

Honestly, cant make this up.

And so the list goes on…

We like bbpress Sam, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. But currently, it’s not Fit for Purpose, and it doesn’t do what it claims to do. When you add into that the widening gap between WordPress and BBpress we as a community start to get a bit perturbed.

If you take away all those claims above, the claims that brought us to this site and to this software, then we’re left with a rather generic bit of forum software, that (plug-ins or no plug-ins) doesn’t have the same features or options as other software out there. If you’re a big multinational with millions of forum posts, then maybe that’s ideal, but maybe, just maybe, its not what everyone is after.

This is the crux of the issue. If you’re building something that is purely aimed at being the forum software for WordPress.com, then lets take down the bullshit on the website, and we’ll all skuttle off.

If we’re all helping Automattic in making BBpress an amazing alternative in to bloated forums, then you have to realise that living up to your bbpress’s own website’s statements of fact is simply the least we expect.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I actually had the same reaction the JJJ had, and i feel that Chris Hajer did a really nice job in summing it up. My initial thoughts were, so Sam is posted missing for 2 months and when he reappears he’s made a facebook page??? (it’s hard to think that automattic got $29million in January to pay for sucj development but i digress).

Sam, i think that maybe you cant see the wood for the trees here mate.

I know, you know, JJJ and CK knows that Matt wanted XML-RPC controls in BBpress. Which is ofc all and well as he pays the bills. But as i’ve said before, there is NOT ONE post about it (request, bug, questions, comment) on this forum or on _CK_’s showcase forum, because it’s frankly of little or not use to any of us. That is not to say developers cant see it’s value in the long run, it’s just that when you say that WordPress is a “moving target” we kind of think… Yeah, but you’ve had 8 months to hit that target and instead you’ve developed a feature that no-one wants or uses. Heck you folks at WP dont use it (it’s THAT bloody useful).

I, and everyone else, understand the way in which this software came about. We also understand that it’s officially ‘beta’ though lets be honest you guys call 0.9 stable. But that’s not to say that maybe, just maybe, if you want this software community to thrive then listening in some part to the concerns of the community who are doing our best to help is a step in the right direction.

“Integration of user tables and cookies is a priority on the other hand, as is creating a full XML-RPC interface for those who want to pull data into a WordPress install”

So what you’re saying is that you have two priorities. One which has a forum full of people pulling their heads out and screaming over. And one that no-one is needing straight away. Why, oh WHY, is the later being worked upon first?

Surely, and i’m worried this might cause personal offence where none is intended, ANY IDIOT can see that logging in and registration is, i dunno, VITAL to a forum?!?!?

So why is it not the TOP priority?

And if it is the top priority, and its so unbelievably complex that making BBpress integrate with WP 2.6 or 2.7 in the 248 days since the cookie processing change was announced, is it likely that we’re going to have it fixed any time soon?

[kevinjohngallagher]

Sadly not mate.

I know what you’re thinking.

Something like : https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

But no, it’s all guess work.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I know what you’re thinking, that it probably *should* be mentioned either here:

https://bbpress.org/documentation/integration-with-wordpress/

or

https://bbpress.org/download/

but it’s not

BBpress, great software, also useful for testing your abilities to mind read!

[kevinjohngallagher]

I suppose the overriding feeling i’m getting from this is that, how can we, as a community, who want BBpress to get better and fit the needs of many know where to start if we’re not given any indication.

I’ve searched these forums, I can’t find one single solitary post with with phrase “XML-RPC” in it. There’s not one tag with it in it. So why build it? Well obviously it was a feature requested by someone at Automatic, which is fine, but lets not pretend then that the community has anything to do with this. If it’s a feature the community didn’t want, didn’t need, has 0 support questions over, has discussed 0 times in in forums, etc etc then lets not pretend that the community of developers have any real input.

So i take back my earlier comments about there being no project manager, feature list, or road map. There clearly is all 3 of these, we the community/users/developers apparently just aren’t worth the money to it would cost to post the existing documentation online.

I think, we’re all happy to be the people on the bottom peg of the ladder. The people that are giving up their free time, in the hope that it provides a better product for all of us at the end of the day. But this whole thing just doesn’t sit right with me anymore…

[kevinjohngallagher]

“Oh one big thing I should point out – the features in bbPress, and the time of the main developers are first and primarily geared towards the need of Automattic and WordPress.org – people forget or don’t realize that.”

We don’t get or realize that because… it’s not written anywhere.

We’re not mind readers.

“The features that are “missing” from bbPress just happen to be the features that Matt decided weren’t a priority for WordPress.org and the other Automattic forums.”

Oh. See, now that’s a totally different light on the subject. I didn’t realise i was building something for Matt to fit Matt’s needs and for the needs of Matt’s companies. Maybe that should be written down somewhere too…

“It’s also why there is no documentation, remember Matt has to pay the coders, why does he need documentation for 3rd party plugin developers if it’s just going to cost money.”

I do understand that, but surely the actual developers have some form of documentation too. Couldn’t we all see that to make ‘Matts’ product better? And it’s not like Automatic is short of a few bob.

Surely, from a business point of view, having documentation to increase the number of theme and plugin developers will increase the take-up rate of BBpress.

“bbPress 1.0 and the backpress integration are now being driven by Matt’s goal of TalkPress for WordPress.com members.”

So, what this means is that we can’t, as a community, do anything about anything, because we’re all following Matt’s plan, to which we have no feature list or roadmap or really any visibility of?

I dont expect Matt, or really any WordPress/Automatic employee, to have to run things by anyone in the community – i’m not saying that I do. But the… pretence that this is an open source project is totally nullified if we’re all coding against a grand plan and road map we’re not allowed to see.

If the new standard answer is going to be “that’s not on Matt’s wishlist but we’re not going to tell you what is on it – go on GUESS” then can start to see why so many people have left the BBpress community, and why all the themes/forums we’re seeing all look the same.

[kevinjohngallagher]

And where could Matt possibly find the money to pay for these develoeprs with the $29million he got in January…

(thats a joke btw)

[kevinjohngallagher]

Just seen Sam pop up on these boards (was beginning to think he was a myth), so hopefully we’ll get an answer on some of these points we’ve made

[kevinjohngallagher]

Great answers again _CK_.

As always you bring an authoritative voice to this discussion.

“Tables have vertical rows that can be sorted which would be 100x times harder with lists. Javascript has specific abilities on tables that don’t exist in lists. Lists do not have vertical relationships between their “cells”.”

I’m going to be one of those guys here a sec and say you’re totally and utterly wrong about this.

The DOM of a browser treats a TABLE like an XML file that it iterates through in a singular parent/child relationship.

The DOM of a browser treats a LIST like an XML file that it iterates through in a singular parent/child relationship.

Both are sorted based on their parent AND their attributes.

The perception that tables are easily sorted natively by JavaScript is only brought to the fore because libraries such as jQuery etc. have built in functions to sort tables. The same underlying code works for lists in exactly the same way.

eg. The browsers DOM can’t tell the difference between:

TABLE

– TR

– – TH

– TR

– – TD

and

DIV

– DIV

– – DIV

– DIV

– – DIV

or

OL

– LI

– – SPAN

– LI

– – SPAN

Let me give you an example again; Back to the backpacker website (real world examples are good I find).

UK (Category)

– England

– – London

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

– Scotland

– – Edinburgh

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

– – Glasgow

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

Now if we output these as 1 flat tables (even with fancy CSS tags), and we use JavaScript to sort it (lets say alphabetically), we get this:

Edinburgh

England

Glasgow

Hostels

Hostels

Hostels

London

Scotland

Travel

Travel

Travel

UK (Category)

Because, again, if things are in a singular flat table structure there is not way of knowing which child belongs to which parent.

Again, i’m only advocating the use of lists for the forums, not the topic list, which is a singular list, and therefore well suited to using tabular data.

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

What I want to stress here, because i’m feeling like i’m repeating myself a little and thats never good, is that i’m NOT here to get BBpress to change from tables to lists or divs or anything else.

What i’m here to discuss is that BBpress is going down a route, a route that solves one set of needs. Can you list the topics in a singular table in a singular order while the only differentiation between each row/cell is in the CSS worked out after the tag has been sent to the browser.

That is a very very singular way of doing things. My point is that all over the shop here in BBpress 1.0a we’re doing things in a singular method, and not in any way giving any for of extensibility to the software.

I use the forum parent/child output example cos it’s on the front page. I could use the example of having template functions HARD CODED in the bb-includes folder as opposed to being in the template folders. I could use the example of “forum” or “topic” being slapped before all the permalinks with no option to remove them.

Lets be honest here, in terms of changes from 1.0a1 to 1.0a2 the first 17 changes were style changes to the template file that we’re all (hopefully) going to replace with our own template.

The 3 latest changes to the repository have been to fix TYPOS in the comments.

There was 85 days, almost a 1/3 of a year between 0.9 release and 1.0alpha, and I may be wrong here but the biggest change seems to be that XML RPSeeWhoCaresAboutThisReally was added.

People are complaining about the same things on this board over and over. Most plug-ins were written over a year ago, and have been hacked to death. Vital information is stored on Page 3 of a forum thread started 18 months ago because no-ones updated the website.

Heck, saying that 0.9.0.2 the STABLE bbpress release doesn’t actually work with anything beyond 2.5.1 of wordpress, let alone the stable wordpress release of 2.6.3 ISN’T EVEN ON ANY OF THE WEBSITE PAGES. It’s stored on the forum software, in a random post.

This is not a complain against the great men and women who have done some marvellous work here, _CK_ so far is a screaming example of someone who’s given up huge amounts of time and created some amazing code, but come on.

If we try to develop something with no roadmap, no feature list; if we try to solve single problems with singular solutions; if we do this all with no documentation; heck if we do this with no project management whatsoever then we’ll end up with a bunch of things that look somewhere between a blog and a forum all with slightly different colours and a different header picture.

Then we can all pretend that we’ve build a totally extendable bit of software that every user has just decided to use exactly the same way out of pure luck, and not because they’re effectively forced to.

Heck while we’re at it, i’m going to pretend i’m Brad Pitt. Make believe is SO much fun. I’d suggest you all try it, but maybe you’re already there…

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi _CK_,

Once again thanks for a great technical answer.

Can i follow it up with a quickie though:

Where in the documentation is all of those methods listed?

Are there other things i can call from $bb_forums_loop that may help is theme developers?

Where is the documentation for them?

P.S. your answer really helped me alot, i’ll rewrite by current code now

[kevinjohngallagher]

wow JohnJames, that is an excellent link and site.

I’m totally onbaord with the use of compliant tables for listing of tabular data. In terms of the topics, it’s 100% ideal, and done well by BBpress.

I also also totally agree that lists such as the forums, should be output to the screen as Definition lists with proper headings. Browsers wont know the difference (with the right CSS) and screen readers and search engines can better index. I might edit my example to do that tonight.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m not sure who has access to edit the information on this website (outwith the forums) but any change we could have :

<b>”Do NOT try to integrate WordPress 2.6 with bbPress 0.9 – only use WP 2.5.x – the reason for this is simple – WordPress has radically changed the way cookies are used. “</b>

oooh i dont know, maybe on the INTEGRATION TO WORDPRESS page?!?! or even on the download section.

How daft is it to hide it away in a forum when it’s quite essential information? If you download the latest stable wordpress and the latest stable BBpress – they’re uncompatable. that to me seems kind of important to new people who download stable releases of both to get started!

[kevinjohngallagher]

Thanks mate,

it’s definately a work in progress. the plan of it was not to emulate the CODE of phpBB press, but instead to emulate how it looks. As you can see, the difference between having the positioning and CSS in before the TR / TD is worked out allows theme developer far more options.

And oddly, screen readers and modified browsers LOVE LOVE LOVE lists (ul/li, or dl/dt/dd). they have buttons to skip right past the ones you don’t want based on criteria and this means sifting through the parent/child heirarchy so much easier than tables. For tables screen readers (much like the DOM itself) skips line by line.

So on my website, if you chose Eurpoe, and the first forum was UK. with Nested divs and Lists you could hit next and go to Ireland. With tables you’d go to the next TR, which would be england, then london, then scotland etc.

I want to stress here 2 things,

1) i in no way want to turn bbpress into phpBB, i just figured i’d use it as an example win my layouts, because as bloated as it is, it actually does the nesting output really well.

2) I in no way want this singular issue to be the only thing we’re discussing here. It’s one of many examples where i think we’er going down a particular route.

Finally…@Ipstenu : “I can’t visualize something ‘less rigid’ than the current iteration of bbpress type forms, since tags gives you a rather light level of ‘org’. “

This is feel is the crux of the problem, as long as we have tags (which are great) we feel we’ve a fluid cross pollination forum going on. But if you take tags away for a sec (lets say the users didn’t put them in); then what your left with is 1 list of topics and 1 list of forums. That’s the definition of rigid.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Before i run off, I made this today:

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

Now, i’ve left $show_children=true, and added a crappy padding-left:20px to the CSS so that you can see the potential (though it totally looks crap).

The point of this is that 1) it works with existing plugins and 2) it doesn’t require plugins to work and 3) can be flicked back to the good old fashioned table stucture with a flick of a variable 9or removing the CSS padding).

The difference is that mine can be iterated through via the DOM and have the DOm understand the parent child relationship, and can be read successfully in the same way by a screen reader.

Also the HTML TAGS (in this case divs) for categories, parents, childs, siblings etc, are set up via a variable. So can be tables, divs or lists. All with the flick of a variable.

My point all along, has been, if we build something that can output one solution, then we’ll only ever meet the needs of that solution. If we build something that CAN meets the needs of many, then we meets the needs of the original (list all forums in a table) AND the needs of others.

P.S.

Anonymous posting is on, as is instant password if you want to register a fake account and have a wee look.

Now this is todays work, so dont expect too much, it’s merely a vehicle to show the potential.

EDIT: some of the forums are marked as hidden, so you may want to make an account. sorry, wanted to show it doesnt’ break forums and then went and hid one of the big ones. D’oh.

[kevinjohngallagher]

“But yes, yes, GOD yes, the documentation whomps. Then again, so did WordPresses back in the day “

Agreed.

But lets learn from those mistakes

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi _CK_,

Firstly, sorry about the gender thing (I blame going from French to English – to simplify I make everything masculine).

I’ve used the categories in 1.0alpha CK, and they do work wonders in the back end.

You make a number of really good points here, really good ones so if it’s cool I’ll go through them one by one.

It’s not just that I don’t “immediately see the solution” (though I admit I don’t), but lets run with that for a bit There is no documentation, there is no list of tags I can use and their features (e.g. https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags) which starts to make a lot of template development guesswork. Are we honestly at the stage of saying that any theme designer or developer out there now needs to be a PHP guru and also know BBpress inside and out to be able to produce a non-liner theme?

If we are, maybe, just maybe that why we’ve found it so hard to get people to use BBpress; and maybe that’s why almost all of the themes out there look the exactly same.

Heck, even when I did manage to code a solution, I found that so much of the template is NOT in the actual editable template but in the damned /bb-includes/template-fucntions.php file that I was close to giving up. (this btw is another example of how NOT theme developer friendly BBpress is – there is NO documentation on how to overwrite these functions in a theme, and I’m somewhat confident that it’ll need a plugin – which also can’t be distributed in a theme).

I totally understand and am impressed with BB1.0alpha’s understanding of categories and forums in a parent/child hierarchy. The backend totally seems to grasp them – and in fact I’ve used the ‘forum is categories’ plug-in with 0.9 and it worked really well (congratulations and thanks whoever developed it).

But you’ve hit on the crux of the problem with “the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet”.

This is the ‘mindset’ I was talking about originally. You’re coding and what you’ve given this community is amazing and without reproach, so hopefully you won’t mind me using you as en example.

What we’re doing is effectively plastering over the crack. We’re fixing the… visible bit of the problem (does that make sense in English, it’s a bit like “tip of the iceberg” thing which makes no sense in french). Let me hark back to your impressive Unread Posts plug-in (which is wonderful). Rather than actually say ok this FORUM or TOPIC that we’re iterating though has unread posts, you coded a plug-in that ONLY worked it out when building the CSS of the actual forum name. It’s like, shooting the small fish downstream and then having to constantly go back upstream when someone points out that the bigger fishes are still there.

People want Parent/Child? Sure we’ll make the change in the DB and admin.

People want Categories? Sure we’ll give it to them in the DB and admin.

People want to make changes to the template? Sure we’ll only work out if its’ a parent/child in the CSS because no-one has specifically asked us via a letter from the queen to give it to them in the $GLOBAL[‘forum’] variable 2 lines above. I mean, we COULD work it out before hand, but why would we do that, because then people could do what they wanted with the theme and CSS – heck they wouldn’t be stuck to using tables in a linear fashion and… oh, no, wait…

It’s… fire fighting, it’s fixing the visible bit of the problem without actually tackling WHY people might have spotted the issue. It’s not a complaint, truly it’s not, the coding that’s been done is wonderful and I’m always impressed by it; but the mindset the thought process behind these features, isn’t wide enough.

You yourself can see how scarce this and bbshowcase forums are, it’s hardly a bustling thriving community. If we’re honestly waiting for someone to specifically come and ask for processing to be done at the earliest stage possible and not just at the CSS level then we may be waiting a long while.

I appreciate that it’s “Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like” for someone of your obvious expertise, but not everyone in the community could do that. And while I think I could make a decent stab at it, not everyone here could, and certainly not everyone who could design/develop a theme could. Not to mention that as a THEME we’d need to specify plugins that need to be installed at the same time. Surely the good developers here at BBpress can see that’s not how a THEME works in wordpress.

What we’re effectively doing is adding a double step. We’re saying that to be a theme developer, you need to be able to code PHP plugins and be able to read, sift, assume and work out all the relevant tags/functions/classes/object without any documentation. That’s a massive massive assumption. Which is what my original mindset point was – we’ve effectively built a piece of software that’s really good for us the “open source loving / developing / community” but not good for the average user/owner.

BBpress has so much potential, and whether people in the community think that my particular examples are valid or not (we are all entitled to our opinion), surely we can all agree on certain points:

Making BBpress website structure and look fit into a more wordpress.org format will help people stick around:

Increasing the documentation will make things a lot easier.

Not presuming that template developers are PHP wizards.

Making the structure of the core files match WordPress more.

I, like all of you, want BBpress to be better. But right now we’re going down one path, and the more we go down it, the harder it will be to allow people to take their BBpress forum in it’s own direction.

[kevinjohngallagher]

2 wonderful replies. Excellent to have a frank discussion like this.

I’ll deal with them separately if that’s ok?

@Johnjames

I do love that BBpress allows the owner to specify how much of what type of emphasis can be placed on what area of the discussion, or to add/remove features based on plug-ins. I’m all for that.

What I’m saying is, that the way we currently handle things, and the way we currently build things actually negates that. If you want a hierarchal system, you can’t have it. Categories are just forums. We don’t iterate though levels to produce our structure where Forums belong to Categories. Because Categories are just forums with an extra DB mark, there’s no ownership.

(yes at the back end we can set the parent/child relationship up, but at the front end we don’t have access to that information).

Infact, from a template perspective, we only access the information about the forum’s relationship with those around it (parent, child, sibling, uncle, nephew) when we work out the CSS – AFTER the table has been created. This entirely nullifies the option to handle a feudal system with controllable Parent / Child options for the owner / theme developer.

(the call to the BBloop->classes() that works it out only returns a string of CSS classes instead of an object we can use to work things out ourselves).

As someone who deals with accessible websites a lot, I can tell you that outputting tables for a list of the topics is great. Outputting a flat table with different CSS (that gets stripped by the screen reader) for a hierarchal parent/child relationship is totally pointless. Going the other way, for our more fancy theme developers, it really messes up JavaScript iterating and controlling the DOM; and also starts to cause real issues with CSS layouts on older /non-standard compliant browsers.

(ever wonder why all the BBpress themes all look really really similar)

My point is, if I want to go with the flat list of topics as many do, then BBpress lets me, which is ace. If I don’t though, then BBpress starts to cause me huge issues. I’m all for owners being able to choose to do as much or as little as they want with BBpress – but right now, with the current set up, choosing to emulate the basic STRUCTURE of the bigger boards simply isn’t an option.

Yes we can do it in the back end (categories > forums > forum > forum > topic) but we cant do it in the front end; because we don’t iterate through the parent/child relationships like we would say… an xml file, instead we just list all the cats/forums.

To keep with your Pizza analogy, if you said “What do you want on your pizza” and I said “tomato, and give me a coke and fries too” – but when I get the pizza delivered the fries are on a coke drenched pizza. Oh what, you didn’t want it all mushed together in a single item? SWOwman, sorry, what you meant to say was:

Pizza

– Tomato Sauce

– Cheese

– Pepperoni

Drink

– Coke

Side order

– Fries

Shit man, we just mush all that stuff together with no differentiation until it’s output (see we’ve slapped the coke label on the side for you).

Basically, having a standard output that is rigid doesn’t make us more robust, it makes us less flexible. And that, as you have pointed out JohnJames, is one of the joys of BBpress. It’s flexible in so many ways – just not this one.

(and this is just one example)

[kevinjohngallagher]

Indeed JohnJames, you are right on many of your points (if not all).

I think we should do more to compliment where we’re similar to WordPress with BBpress. The code structure and website are two key issues, and i’ve mentioned a few more up above (trying not to be too boring and repeat myself).

Your points of the cross-polination ability of BBpress, by allowing topics to be tagged by multiple keywords, is 100% valid. It’s situational ofcourse, but i can see why it’s well liked.

My point was more… what do the end users think/want? If we say that we think all end users want little drilling down of categories or parent/child nodes, but instead to sift through tags that anotehr user might or might not have put on their post, then we are paramount to saying that every other piece of forum software has it wrong for the past 10 years. Thats quite massive.

I’m really glad I found BBpress, i’m glad to find such great developers and a good open community, but the more I see where we’re going the less flexible to other approaches we appear to be.

I mean, the BBpress core has a parent child hierarchy for forums, but doesn’t actually differentiate the outputted code apart form CSS. It basically treats it as a flat list. Surely, it’s clear that this hampers our theme developers. Because, lets be a little blunt here, they do all look somewhat similar.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Wow, i think you just nailed one of my niggling issues with the install.

Well done and thanks.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Ipstenu,

thanks very much for taking the time to write back. I’m glad you saw this as a discussion and not something negative towards BBpress.

Maybe i wrote it wrong, but my point is not what “we” the internet community intend BBpress to be, but more what “they” the community of end users want it to be.

BBpress in it’s current form is just a blog. users log on, post a blog, people leave comments. There’s a list of tags, blog posts (sorry “topics”), and um… thats it.

I know, and you know, and i’m sure the intelligent people that have written this lovely bit of code know, that a forum and a blog are very very similar.

When I got into the simplicity of BBpress before the summer, I tried to convince a number of my fellow web enthusiasts to take up the cause. But the more they looked at it, the more disdain they had. I’ve stuck with it, and continue to do so of course, as i thought with each release getting closer to 1.0RC we’d get there.

But we’ve not created a forum.

Forums have a different mindset to Blogs, and don’t get me wrong i’m ok with using plug-ins, it’s just that we’re fixing bugs/issues with a Blog mindset. That is, blogs list things in a singular direction. Forums, by the nature in terms of what the END USER expects, work in a cross polination way.

Yes tags are a good idea, but tags are reliant on the end user.

To give an example:

I recently had to take down BBpress from a backpacker website because the users weren’t putting in tags. The plan being that instead of UK > Scotland > Edinburgh > Travel > Topic that users could just use the UK Travel forum and tag “edinburgh” or “london” etc. Instead, we had 100s of “how do i buy cheap bus tickets” or “cheapest way to travel” or “1 ticket spare” etc with NO tags.

The site lastest 6 weeks before the owner demanded I take it down and replace it with “actual forum software” – that’s a quote from their IT department btw.

But lets give a counter example:

Wordpress.org uses BBpress and it’s working great. Loads of Topics, tags, and few forums. No real need for categories. Same with the technorati one. It’s a credit to BBPress – and nothing can take away from that and the amazing work done by the BBpress team and community… BUT… there’s always a but isn’t there… the people that use WordPress/Technorati are people like us, they are technical, they are used to tags and searching for exactly what they want. They are *not* the typical end user on the internet.

I’m all for free form Ipstenu, i totally get what you mean, and if that suits the needs of your community then great. For me, its suits the needs of some of mine, the problem is as soon as we get into the territory of what people think “all forums” should do, BBpress really starts to look… well, not like a forum.

The more we code, the more we’re coding a wordpress clone, yet not cloning their proven and successful techniques. Our website should match their website (heck, screw the colours, just in terms of layout and user flow), our methods should match their methods. I, no WE, want to help, we want BBpress to be better, but more importantly we want it to fulfil it’s mission statement; and right now that’s not quite happening.

[kevinjohngallagher]

So, the issue with the method implemented in : https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/hiding-subforums-subforums-from-subforum-pages

is that it only checks for the lineage of the forum before it.

This causes problems when you have multiple children to multiple children, as thus:

category

– Forum1

– – Child 1

– – – Child1’s child

– – Child 2

That method will make BBpress think that Child 2 is actually under Child1’s Child, because when testing if their parents are the same they clearly are not.

Instead, we have to create a nesting code that counts the depth to which we go as we trawl through each parent/child relationship – which is daft as there is a walker->depth function that we just don’t have access to via $GLOBALS.

EDIT:

Update – not knowing if it’s the last forum in a category is starting to kill me a little.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Funnily enough i’ve made the same hack solution as instructed in this topic: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/hiding-subforums-subforums-from-subforum-pages

The problem is, the idea of checking for the forum parent id is ok when dealing with a singular table. If it’s got the same parent fine, if it’s not do something else. But the whole thing starts to get messy when dealing with non-linear tables. If your forum has multiple sub forums or parent child relationships the whole thing starts to crumble, or if you’re using a javascript DOM indexer 9say you want open close functionality), or if you’re aiming for a a UL/LI version instead of tables (i’m not against tables for tabular data btw – but for parent child iterations screen readers prefer UL/LI loops).

I’ll post my theme with these hacks and hopefully you can see what I mean, because i’m a bit stunned about how rigid this all is given the excellent coding that’s been developed by the authors so far.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Well, there’s no good way of putting this without making it look like i’m flogging my own dead horse, but here goes:

Can someone tell me why we’re working out vital data in regards to each forum on as CSS links?

Why on Earth don’t we work out each attribute at the start of the loop, and then feed off an object, giving our template developers and therefore users far more options?

As it stands, we call bb_forum_class(); inside the TR, which then creates the $bb_forums_loop object; which calls classes();, and that works out all the attributes of the forum, but rather than sending them back as a usable object the whole thing returns a string of CSS code.

Why not allow template developers access to:

$bb_forums_loop->first_child

$bb_forums_loop->last_child

$bb_forums_loop->bb_root

etc?

I mean, the code itself if great, and the job you’ve done is really good, but it fixes one singular issue (getting the right CSS output), rather than fixing the bigger problem of not knowing all attributes of the forum. Not only does it lead to very messy templates (if someone can be bothered to deal with it – and i’ve not seen a template that has yet), but it does indeed duplicate alot of the work.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Vuuch,

You copy the contents of the “bbpress” folder into your “forum” folder. Basically, click through your ZIP file and all the subsequent folders until you see files (not just a folder). Copy everything at that level to your forums folder.

Good Luck