[Rootside]

@JJJ – Excellent, thanks.

@Ryan Gannon – Go to page 13 in this thread, you’ll find some information there.

[Rootside]

Sorry to just barge in and shout out a random question, this has probably been answered before:

Will the plugin come with a front-end login/signup form? Or will it make use of existing WP plugins?

I’m running the latest version in a test environment, and this function seems to be missing – or is it me who missed something?

Thanks

[Rootside]

Same issue here – the whole Forum section is gone from the Admin menu.

[Rootside]

Yes – it was version (or “changeset”) 2564 when I posted the above. Now it’s 2571.

[Rootside]

JJJ on page 1 of this thread: “Looking more like October 17 now, to be exact.” – in response to when “a version for alpha testing” could be ready. Presumably something including the features mentioned in the very first post of this thread.

I think everybody is looking forward to a version that includes some rudimentary front-end templates, so people can roughly see how it might work and look, and many people were expecting this to be ready around the 15th, or “to be exact”, on the 17th.

[Rootside]

You’re wanting to compare an unsupported, unintentional, unadvisable, found-by-mistake hack (that doesn’t always work) against a theoretical piece of software. It’s a no-brainer which will compare favourably.

Yeah well, exactly.

The comparison you propose might be fair when it comes to judging pure performance, but a “normal” integration doesn’t give you what you and your users should expect:

Common elements like a header, a navigation and other functions should be available and work the same across the whole site without you having to mimic them for a forum section, changes you might make to those elements shouldn’t have to be made twice, and if you get a single admin panel at the backend on top of all that, then that theoretical piece of software becomes extremely desirable.

Proper integration, if I may call it that, is an absolute requirement in my opinion, because a forum is always just one component of a larger website in what I do, and I’d be surprised if that didn’t apply to many people here. It then becomes a different problem, of course: is the loss of performance on my forum pages acceptable, does it scale (does it blend , what kind of hosting would I need to run things smoothly etc.? That’s kind of what I’m trying to feel out, and I just have the feeling that a plugin wouldn’t do such a bad job, all things considered.

Fully agree with your point that Matt is the one who would have to get things moving after basically announcing that this is going to happen.

[Rootside]

I understand the desire to make a WP plugin that is a forum, I can see Matt’s viewpoint on that, but in comparison to bbPress as it stands, it’ll be far from lightweight.

Fair enough, but as you state further down in your post, most if not almost all of that bloat would come from WordPress, no?

In my opinion, a fair comparison would have to be WP/bbPress (deep integration) and WP/forumpluginX.

I accept that there may be better ways to run a forum than to wrap WordPress around it. But other things need to be taken into account, eg how much time would I have to spend to ensure that the forum (or specifically the forum’s header and footer etc.) looks and behaves like the rest of my site? Can I leave a site with a less tech-savvy admin at all, or will I have to maintain everything forever because said admin can’t get his head around dealing with WP AND a forum that “works kind of like WP but not really”? And so on.

Of course, first and foremost the thing needs to run, and run reasonably fast. But this is also a question of priorities.

Sure, many people will not even realise that there’s an issue, or they might simply not give a toss, but for the rest of us it comes down to whether some additional bloat and a more sluggish forum might not be acceptable if we get clean integration and a single backend interface in return.

I think any discussion about bbPress as a plugin should be seen in this context.

[Rootside]

He even admitted that right now, it would be better off to use another plugin rather than bbPress.

Nevermind if it’s insulting, it’s just wrong. I’ve looked closely at a few WP forum plugins, and they’re all spectacularly ugly, near-impossible to customise, or criminally bloated. Or all of these things.

That said, he does have a point when it comes to installation. I’ll happily jump through a few hoops to get something working, but I’m not sure I’d recommend bbPress unless I was sure the person knows what they’re doing.

All in all though, I went for bbPress precisely because it’s still better than all the other solutions. I realise I’m only speaking for myself and other people might miss functions they consider to be essential; and I wish them good luck trying to tame Simple:Press or wrestle phpBB into their site, but I consider bbPress to be a niche product because it provides a simple, basic, themable forum, and I just assume that that’s what people who use it were looking for.

I’m further assuming that the majority use bbPress in conjunction with a WordPress site, and in that context, I don’t understand why it shouldn’t be a plugin. I personally can’t wait for that to happen, because as bloated as WordPress might be, most people are using it anyway, so the question whether it’s good or bad to load WordPress in order to use bbPress doesn’t even arise for most people.

(edit) If we’re talking loading WP core stuff on every forum page, fine, I get that argument, but again, I doubt that bbPress is the right solution for a big, high traffic forum anyway.(/edit)

And the way I understand it, if someone wants to run just a forum, wouldn’t they probably be looking for something more powerful and feature-rich than bbPress in the first place?

A bbPress plugin would surely be a lot lighter than the current bbPress, no? How is that not a good thing? Am I totally off with my guess that most bbPress users are also running WordPress anyway?

Maybe it can go different ways indeed (renaming it would be a good idea in that case, obviously). That would preserve all the good work that has gone and is going into bbPress.

By the way:

Has anyone considered the possiblity that Matt is keeping his eyes peeled on the current efforts of some people trying to use nothing but WordPress’ core functions to build a simple forum? I’m guessing that any WP plugin which makes that kind of thing easy to set up and enhances its functionality would be really lightweight.

On a different note, I also don’t get how anyone could read a flame war into any of the discussions here. At all.

[Rootside]

It basically does exactly what it says.

Normally, styles are applied in the order they appear in – lets say you first define the color red for the h1 tag, and further down you define the color blue for h1, or for every child of the body tag or whatever. h1 would then appear blue, but not if you add !important to the first rule. !important overrides rules that appear later.

It makes sense if you need your rules in a specific order but want to define some exceptions.

It’s also often misused as a quick and lazy way to resolve conflicts in the stylesheet – people often slap an !important onto the rule they want to see applied when they have accidentally overriden it with some other stuff later in the document.

In your case, it wasn’t necessary because your rule appears after the one from the imported stylesheet – it just didn’t work because #front-page #hottags is a more specific selector than just #hottags.

[Rootside]

Correct. Just changing your selector above from #hottags to #front-page #hottags should be enough, it should override the rule in the imported stylesheet:

#front-page #hottags { background: #DFDFDF; border: 1px solid #888; }

Try the following if the above (unexpectedly) doesn’t work:

#front-page #hottags { background-color: #DFDFDF !important; border: 1px solid #888; }

[Rootside]

metaboy: Yes.

1. bbPress generally seems to work fine out of the box with 3.0, at least for me and a few others, so that’s looking good

2. I needed zaerl’s plugin for deep integration, ie using WordPress functions/template tags to pull in the WordPress header and footer. I’ve tested it further since, and haven’t encountered any problems.

In fact, only the registration of new users was ever a problem. I had WordPress 3.0 RC and bbPress running for a few days before I even encountered that issue.

[Rootside]

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/wp-30-beta-2-integrated-user-registration

[Rootside]

Haha, you absolute star. It works, I just installed and tested it. Thank you so much.

Btw, I think it’s missing the closing ?> declaration

Looks like something stupid is going on, doesn’t it. Do we know why this is happening? My PHP knowledge is just good enough to vaguely tell what’s doing what, but I never understand the bigger picture.

[Rootside]

Oh, thanks…

“Deep Integration” was never intended with bbPress sadly

I don’t know – of course I’d really like to have bbPress “deeply integrated”, and it’s particularly frustrating to see that everything seems to work except for the registration process (and some other, solvable little bits like title tag, current page body tag etc.).

But I would probably agree that deep bbPress integration shouldn’t be a priority for WordPress core development. In that respect, having bbPress as a standalone system that also works inside WordPress may simply be asking too much:

Look at other solutions – they’re either bloated or phenomenally ugly and near impossible to customise, or both. But I’ve tested several of them with WordPress 3.0 RC3, and they all get two things right straight away – integration and shared users, with just a few clicks.

They’re also all plugins…

For now, I’ll have to see if someone finds a way around this problem, or if I’ll have to replicate my WordPress theme for bbPress and leave deep integration alone. Stupid, really.

Then there’s also Justin Tadlock, who is building a forum using nothing but WordPress custom post types and custom taxonomies. Should be interesting to see how that pans out…

I’ll stick this on the WP boards – it seems WordPress 3.0 has been released just a few minutes ago, I’m pretty sure others will run into the same problem.

[Rootside]

Wait a minute:

Looks like it might be deep integration that’s causing the problem:

https://bbpress.org/documentation/integration-with-wordpress/ recommends adding require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/path/to/wp-load.php'); to bb-config.php.

I just added that (using the correct path) to my working installation, and I’m getting the ’email is required’ behaviour again. Delete it, and registration works.

I’m not sure if that means deep integration doesn’t work at all with WP3.0…?

[Rootside]

Okay, bug hunting is hereby unsuccessfully terminated for the time being:

I installed WordPress 3.0 RC3 and bbPress 1.0.2 in a different subdomain on the same server, and everything works as it should:

I can register new accounts, they show up in WordPress without a role, but as soon as I’ve logged in and posted a reply, I’m mapped as a subscriber in WordPress.

Adding a new user in WordPress works as well, I can hop over to bbPress, log in with the details chosen in WordPress, and post as a member.

Now that I see it working on the same server, I must have made a mistake in the first installation, or it’s a crazy bug. I doubt it had to do with my custom theme, because I switched back to the defaults during testing. However, I’ve only tested the new installation with the defaults, I’ll be back here if anything goes weird…

I’m still slightly uneasy about this of course, because I usually find the bugs or errors, even if I can’t always (okay, rarely) solve or correct them myself. But given that bbPress is BY FAR the best solution for a simple forum on WordPress, I simply had to make it work. Non-intrusive custom themes and Akismet are just two reasons why bbPress is so far ahead of other WordPress integrated solutions; I’ve tested 4 alternatives over the last week or so – OMFG.

The only thing I can offer to others is to try again, following Sam Bauer’s screencast at https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/basic-integration-screencast

(with one addition: when bbPress asks for the cookie salts and you can’t find them on the admin page bbPress links to, copy them from wp-config.php)

[Rootside]

Upgraded to WordPress RC 3, still getting the same error.

print_r($_POST); gives me the following:

Array ( [user_login] => hello [user_email] => xxxxxxx@rootside.com [user_url] => [from] => [occ] => [interest] => [Submit] => Register » )

I obscured the email address here, but it is the one I have entered in the registration form above. So it seems that user_email IS defined.

Thanks for that hint. Maybe it’s a freakish bug – nobody else has chimed in with the same problem so far – but I don’t know how many people are testing WP 3 with bbPress yet, so I’m not quite ready to re-install the whole sermon from scratch again. I’ll try setting up the same combo on a different server as soon as I can find the time, but I’m still hoping that this can be tracked down, so I don’t have to fear for the worst with every future update…

Does the information above give any of you guys an idea?

Again, greatly appreciated.

[Rootside]

Thanks a lot for your help, zaerl – at least we now know that it should be working, or at least it looks like it should be. That’s valuable info.

I’m not sure I’m using the ‘WordPress bbPress cookie plugin’ you mention – I think I’ve seen several plugins that promise to get the integration right – can you point me to the ‘right’ one?

The only plugin I’m using is bbPress Integration 1.0 by Michael Adams and Sam Bauers.

Any other suggestions/guesses? I’d be happy to report back – finding out what’s causing the “email is required” behaviour might be helpful to everybody, considering that there’s at least one other person (Terranb) who’s getting this, and also in light of kevinjohngallagher’s and timskii’s remarks.

Some more information:

The configuration is the same as zaerl’s (except maybe for the plugin mentioned above) – WordPress and bbPress are sharing users, I don’t get booted out of one when I log into the other etc.

The site is hosted on Media Temple’s Grid Service, running PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL 5.1.26

Feel free to have a look if it helps (it’s work in progress):

http://dev.sandithom.com

I’ve tried switching back to the default theme, but the problem was exactly the same…

Thanks everybody – good to find people who are passionate about making it work.

[Rootside]

Same issue here.

bbPress 1.0.2 seems to play nice with WordPress 3.0 RC1, except for this problem.

I actually managed to get one account registered, but I can’t reproduce the situation. I do remember that I didn’t get to see the register-success screen, but I received the confirmation email with the password. All subsequent attempts failed though, as did numerous previous attempts.

Being able to do it once (out of 20 attempts or so) would point to a problem with cookies or being previously logged in, but the problem occured in 4 different browsers, 2 of which had never been used to access this site.

So, bbPress acts like I’m trying to register without providing an email address. Any thoughts?