[pjv]

I made a codex page describing what I learned so far. I don’t know if what I wrote is anything like a best practice, but it worked for me. It would be great if those more knowledgeable would correct and expand on it.

https://codex.bbpress.org/theme-compatibility/getting-started-in-modifying-the-main-bbpress-template/

[pjv]

The answer to my question about which template is being rendered (at least in my case) was `page.php`.

That’s `page.php` from your theme.

So if you, like me, want to do things to the main template in which the bbpress forums are housed, you can use `page.php`.

If you, like me, want to do things to that template ONLY for bbpress stuff, but not for other “pages” in your site, you can use the php function `is_bbpress()` in that template to render conditional html based on whether it is a bbpress page or not.

This seems like amazingly basic and obvious information that I was only able to discern by gritting my teeth and putting bbpress into the text editor and reading through A LOT of code. If this information is documented somewhere easy to find, please enlighten me so that i can perform the requisite face palm. If it’s not, why not?

This is untested by me, but digging through some more code, it looks like you might be able to create a custom home-base template for your bbpress forum by copying the original `page.php` into a new file and naming it any of:”
`’plugin-bbpress.php’,
‘bbpress.php’,
‘forums.php’,
‘forum.php’,
‘generic.php’`

[pjv]

looks like it might be `is_bbpress()` that i am looking for. will report back if that doesn’t work.

EDIT: yup, that was it.

[pjv]

I agree the lack of basic, getting started documentation for CURRENT bbpress is pretty frustrating. Just a basic roadmap of how the plugin works and which template and functions files are the key ones for making basic changes would be very helpful. A high-level technical overview of what is what and where.

For example, does anyone know which template is being rendered when I go to my-site.com/forums? More importantly, can anyone give me the rosetta stone so that I could figure something like that out myself at a glance without having to read through a ton of code?