Hey Mike,
I’m glad you found something that worked for you. I’ll have to look at Vanilla too, I’m not familiar with it. Always interesting to see what’s out there.
Just for the record, even if you did a fresh install of bbpress, if you had a conflicting plugin this would prevent it working from the get-go…
Or, pull a template file from one of the BBpress templates, name it forum.php and put it in your theme folder if you want it to be drastically different / forum-y-looking without doing a ton of redesign.
Another detail – to get started creating your forum.php file, make a copy of for example your page.php or single.php file and rename it. Then style it however you want.
Just don’t touch ‘the loop’ itself and especially the <?php the_content(); ?> query. Essentially your forums are just wordpress pages of a special post type and they will need to be called with those elements in the template just like any other post / page.
Ah ha!
I shoulda gone for the obvious.
In my case it was a plugin conflict.
I installed 3 SEO-related plugins since I last saw my forum up and running and just now turned them off one by one to see if the problem would resolve.
Meta Tag Manager ended up being the culprit! I turned it off and everything came in again.
Even if you don’t have that plugin, try turning off your plugins, if any, one by one to see if that helps…
Good luck!
When you say ‘create a forums page in wordpress’ do you mean you go to Posts or Pages within wordpress to create a page titled “forum”?
You will have much more control over the look if you create a custom template page that sits in your theme folder, called, “forum.php”.
This post helped me 2 weeks ago when I was tearing at my hair over this problem:
Understanding templating.
In that template, you can add bbpress’ sidebar bits by grabbing the php from the bbpress templates and inserting them into your own.
Hope that helps – let me know how it goes…
Macauley86 – did you actually create a Forum or two in the Forums tab in WordPress? Nothing will show up till you do.
Sorry in advance if I am oversimplifying your problem. 
I think I’m having the same problem.
The strange thing is that it *was* working up until this morning. In our case, we moved some folders around – we had an old folder of BBPress and it’s possible when we archived it things went wacky. There’s this in the bbpress.php file:
/**
* Note to Plugin and Theme authors:
*
* Do not directly reference the variables below in your code. Their names
* and locations in the bbPress class are subject to change at any time.
*
* Most of them have reference functions located in bbp-includes. The ones
* that don’t can be accessed via their respective WordPress API’s.
*/
which might mean some strange paths were written into the core files. We deleted, and started again. I even went into the wp database to delete all the forums and topics we had made… no luck. A fresh install still turns up a blank page which makes me think there could be another old reference somewhere in the database interfering with things.
Either that, or it’s some permalink voodoo.
O mighty BBpress lords (John Jacoby?) I beseech you…. any advice for this dilemma?
