[MTPrower]

I’m going to explode, here.

You’re kidding me, right? Who or what are you getting defensive about? I’m not even TALKING about that! We can already DO exactly what I’m talking about inside a normal page with only several single-forum shortcodes! The problem is, because of breadcrumbs not linking to the new page I can create for that, I can’t use a different page. I have to use the .php page that is the forum-index.

Let me make this as simple as humanly possible. This is all I want on my “forums index”: what you get when you put the following into a page:

[bbp-single-forum id=$forum_id-1]

[bbp-single-forum id=$forum_id-2]

[bbp-single-forum id=$forum_id-3]

Let’s assume those are the id’s of forums of my choosing. In this case, those are the id’s of my three top-level categories. Whatever you get when posting those three shortcodes into one page is EXACTLY what I want as my forums index page. (By the way, all other forums systems already look like this. And don’t assume that everyone likes bbPress’ current index page, which is the only index page of its kind. That is speculation.)

That is all. Nothing more. We can do it on a single page or post, so I know we can do it on a .php file.

And finally, don’t be smart with me. bbPress is the only forums system that integrates with WordPress as well as it does. To have a multimedia site with a completely separate forums is to KILL YOUR SITE. I understand why, if your forums isn’t the landing page of your site, you MUST have full integration between your site and forums in order to keep traffic. That is why I can’t use things other than bbPress.

If you’re going to respond to me, at least read the first post. Just reading the latest two posts isn’t going to give you enough info to respond well without annoying the poster. Please, for the love of god…

[MTPrower]

My website is suffering because nobody is saying anything, and I am extremely annoyed. I was going to be much more impolite, but I decided that wouldn’t get me any answers.

Don’t take it personally– I’m not making a statement about your guys’ skills or competence, but this is still very bothersome.

It’s simple, so simple. The “forums index” or “forums root” puts all categories inside one table, and strips it of “forum content” (usually used as a description of the individual forums), sub-forum “freshness” ( including avatar, author name, and date), and sub-forum post and topic count.

WHATEVER ends up replacing the current “forums index” or “forums root”, it needs to show all categories under their own table, and not strip “forum content”, “freshness”, or post and topic count out of forums or sub-forums.

Like J.J.J. said, I could edit the .php file, but I don’t have time to learn PHP. I’m assuming all I have to do is copy some PHP from loop-single-forum.php or something, but I am at a loss as to figuring out what. I’ve tried and tried all sorts of things.

A “normal” forums wouldn’t have a stripped-down index. I simple don’t understand why bbPress’ index is stripped down– and worse, why nobody knows how to make it NOT stripped down.

Don’t take it personally. You guys aren’t doing anything wrong. It’s just that my site is going to stay practically dead until I get this problem solved, and I am losing what members I have slowly. Most people don’t have the patience I have, which is why I think most people don’t use bbPress…

[MTPrower]

“The WordPress page will always win”? The bbPress settings’ “Forum base” always overrides a page in WordPress by the same slug for me. This has ALWAYS been a problem for me, on any WordPress installation. I use the Origin theme currently, if that helps any…

[MTPrower]

I would try that if I knew how to change where the root link in the breadcrumbs (the root link says “Forums”) goes to, but I don’t know PHP well enough. I hope there’s something I can add to my functions.php to change where the root link goes to…

[MTPrower]

The first thing you said, as the fix to the problem, is correct. I’ve been mucking around with PHP files for a week. I’ve studied loop-forums.php, which seems to be the page I need to change, and loop-single-forum, which seems to be the page I’m trying to replicate the style of, but no matter what I try, I don’t know PHP well enough to find the fix. I use the default bbPress theme.

[MTPrower]

I want the option for it to go to a page of my choosing. People often don’t like the default forums-archive page (which ends up being the root/home page), so they create a WordPress page with bbPress shortcodes in it to be the forums’ home page. The problem is, when they do that, the breadcrumbs root link, which says “forums”, doesn’t go to that page. it goes to the archive page, or forums-index– which is the page they were trying to avoid.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by MTPrower.

[MTPrower]

So what themes do you want me to use? What suggestions do you have?

[MTPrower]

Been 24 hours again. Bump

I see that a lot of people have an issue with this in some form or another, but I’ve only seen one fix– a non-explained hard-coding. It’s unfair to everyone.

I want to be able to change loop-forums.php to look exactly like loop-single-forum.php. That means a new table for every category, a Freshness (author name and avatar, as well as latest post time) for every parent forum inside a category, and the displaying of “content” below the forum title, if we have content on the forum edit page (people usually use that for a description of that particular forum).

Changing the CSS to make each forum have its own line is easy. The REST of the things you have to do to make the forums root, or forums index, look like a single-forum page, is hard.

This is a much-needed tweak. Pretty much everyone would benefit from it. I will keep bumping this as long as I need.

I do want to say that I love bbPress though. I’m not giving up on it in the foreseeable future.

[MTPrower]

I also have this problem, and it’s a major problem.

[MTPrower]

I know this topic is old, but I have to bring something up.

That is the answer that we are always given, but there is still a major problem– the breadcrumbs still link to the forums-index page. How do you get the breadcrumbs to link to your new page?

[MTPrower]

I have the same problem.

[MTPrower]

It’s been 24 hours again. Bump

[MTPrower]

It’s been 24 hours, and this is one of the most fundamental, and seemingly one of the easier-to-fix, problems in bbPress. I’m sure everyone who uses bbPress can benefit from this.

So bump, since I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to do that. It’s been allowed from me before, seemingly even by the great J.J.J.

[MTPrower]

This problem isn’t solved. I’m using bbPress 2.1.2 now, and I can’t, for the LIFE of me, find any way to make it so that “content-archive-forum” looks like “content-single-forum”. Or make it so that the breadcrumbs root, “forums”, just goes to a page of my choosing, ignoring “content-archive-forum” altogether. I wish content-archive-forum just looked like content-single-forum to begin with. That would solve ALL my problems!

This is getting real old. It is, and has always been, the one thing ruining bbPress for me…

[MTPrower]

It’s been 24 hours, so I’m gonna bump. From what I know about past experience, I’m allowed to do that.

Maybe I haven’t been clear about my question– I’m looking for the best way to edit theme files and keep my changes after an update. Should be common knowledge, but the new documentation layout is confusing. I can’t find anything on theme compatibility or WordPress themes taking over bbPress template files…

[MTPrower]

2.0.3. bbPress 2.1 will be out soon? Do you have a changelog I can look over? I’m excited to see it.

Also, I’m putting my site on hiatus. I’m tired of it for a while. But you know what I would like to do? I’d like to help with bbPress. I think the total integration with WordPress that bbPress has is one of the best things ever accomplished for the blogging platform. I would love to assist, do some testing, give some of my thoughts, help promote bbPress, and even help with some new features that I have been hoping or wishing I could see in bbPress’s future.

I don’t know how much help you guys get, but it doesn’t seem like a lot. I wouldn’t ever want to see bbPress die. I want to help, if I may. I know very little about PHP or HTML, but every coder should have a team, to help with the things that coders aren’t best at. I want to help!

[MTPrower]

It has been 24 hours again. This is a very important problem with the bbPress system. Bump.

I’m being patient. I’ll take as long as I need. My site isn’t going anywhere. I think it should be considered a compliment to bbPress– bbPress is good enough for me not to give up on. And I’ve tried many forums systems.

[MTPrower]

It’s been 24 hours since my last post, so *bump*.

[MTPrower]

After screwing around with various options for permalinks and for the location and links for my forums, I have decided, once again, that it is best to hack up the archive-forum.php. In fact, I think this very page should be completely changed to allow you to choose whether you want to display the forums archive there, or if you want to use the wordPress page editor to display shortcodes or whatnot. This should be an option in the bbPress settings.

This would solve pretty much everyone’s problems with permalinks and breadcrumbs, and I think it would be easy to do.

[MTPrower]

The problem I had before is still here, and so I still need to change what the Archive Page shows. Changing the settings as said above worked at first, but now bbPress reverted back to showing the forum Archives on http://mysite.net/forums/ instead of what I put on my WordPress page at that location.

In my site’s main menu, I have a link called “Forums” that leads to “http://mysite.net/community/forums/”. This page is the custom page I made, to show the forum_id’s of my two forum categories, rather than showing the forum Archives.

My WordPress theme has a breadcrumbs system, as does bbPress. On the page that I created, WordPress says my breadcrumb path is:

Home » Community » Forums

While bbPress says it’s:

Home › Forums › Community › Forums

bbPress has this annoying thing about insisting that if you are inside the forums, it will add extra “sub-menus”, or path items, or whatever you call them, to your breadcrumbs.

In the bbPress settings page, I set my “Archive Slugs > Forums base” to “archives”, rather than the default “forums”. For “Single Slugs > Forum prefix”, I unchecked the box “Prefix your forum area with the Forum Base slug (Recommended)”.

bbPress seems to hate playing nicely with your site’s permalinks and breadcrumbs. I’ve always had this problem, ever since I started using bbPress.

I would be more than happy to hack up bbPress a bit so that I can fix the breadcrumbs and permalinks myself. I consider this a very persistent issue, as I see many people to this day wondering how on earth to get their forums to display at the proper location.

If there’s anything I can do to help get this problem fixed more permanently, I’d be more than happy to help.

[MTPrower]

I can’t think of much, except for adding a warning stating that if the Forums base is “forums”, then the forums archive is going to override the page http://www.mysite.com/forums if the person chooses to make a forums page at that location.

On the opposite end, it should be noted that IF they want to put a forums page in that location, then they can’t use “forums” as their archive base.

Sometimes there is a warning that certain pages conflict with each other or with pages in the WordPress installation. I think that if both a WordPress page/post and a forums base/slug are the same “word”, that the error should say more than just “possible conflict”. I think it should say that the slugs or bases will override your WordPress page or post, and explicitly state that those pages or posts won’t show the WordPress page or post content as intended.

Helpful and informative warning messages are indispensable. Vague ones aren’t understood and are soon ignored…

[MTPrower]

That was the problem. You see, under the Settings page for bbPress, there is the Archive Slugs section. Under this is two settings: “Forums base” and “Topics base”. Due to the wording, I never knew that having the “Forums base” setting at its default, which is “forums”, I would never be able to use my WordPress-made custom forums page at http://www.mysite.com/forums , always getting the archives page instead of what I put in shortcodes on my custom page.

Maybe the labels for those settings should be clarified, and the default setting changed. I see lots of people having trouble with this part, and I’ve been using bbPress for a year and just discovered the answer.

Thanks for replying. I appreciate it. If I knew some PHP, and my site was done and I could spare some time, I’d help you with bbPress a bit. I know it must suck not having very many people helping out…

[MTPrower]

I found the bug. You cannot make the “Forums” page that you put shortcodes into a parentless page. If the page is http://www.mysite.com/forums , then going to that URL will only take you to the archive page. Actually, it seems there I might be able to edit that in the settings page. I just had no idea that THAT was what that setting meant. I’m going to go take a look.

I’ve been using bbPress for about a year, and I just NOW discovered what was wrong with my permalinks. I think maybe the “archives” part of the settings page should be set to the word “archives”, not “forums” by default, so people don’t have trouble with this.

Anyway, I’m gonna go mess with that setting and see what happens. I will post my results here for future people to see…

[MTPrower]

It’s been 24 hours, and I can’t do anything with my site until I figure this out. So… “bump”.

[MTPrower]

Is this topic resolved? I was ready to help, seeing that it was marked “Not resolved”, but it seems you have fixed your problem. If you think you’re ready, mark this topic as “Resolved”.