@wtfmatt – Perhaps your time would be better spent on other things than hurling abuse at Matt?
No, they just told me about it via an IM chat a while ago.
IIRC they just converted to phpBB3 and then on to bbPress. That seems to be the standard way of converting between most forum softwares (via phpBB2 or phpBB3).
I think he had a few minor problems with a small details such as website links not being transferred over. But the guts of it, posts, topics, usernames and passwords were all shifted flawlessly from what I heard.
I had the same problem when I created my last new thread. Very weird.
Yes, I’m still using SMF myself. If bbPress changes to being a WordPress plugin I might switch, but at the moment I’ll be sticking with SMF. If it aint broke don’t fix it is my motto as far as forum softwares go.
I know someone who converted from SMF1.1.x to bbPress 1.0 by converting via phpBB3
I did not say/mean you can’t make your own themes GPL licensed and sell them
You said you can’t start with someone elses GPL theme and work from that, which is not correct.
You cannot start with an existing free theme that is GPL and modify it if you are going to sell it.
and
If you are going to sell a theme, start from scratch, not another free theme or you’ll get in trouble eventually.
You are totally incorrect.
There is nothing in the GPL license which prohibits you from selling GPL licensed themes.
WordPress.org even has a page dedicated to promoting the sale of various GPL themes … https://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/
Yes, but the following is quite literal:
This page is a work in progress. Please come back later for updated information.
I haven’t updated it for the new version yet since it’s still in beta. Those instructions won’t work at all with the current version.
I’ll add a note about that to save confusing people.
Thanks for testing it. I’ll hopefully get back to this in a few weeks.
Strange I didn’t notice that bug with .html being missing. I guess it was so obvious to me I just glanced over it.
Yes it’s good for testing, that’s why it is released as a beta.
It seems to be working fine on the one site I installed it on, but I guess I mucked up something in the instructions so I’ll need to sort that out – probably in a few weeks time.
Welcome back 
It felt wrong not having yourself and Sam around anymore. Great to see your site is back up and running again too.
Sorry, haven’t checked back here until now.
All it does is buffer the HTML output of sections of the WordPress theme and then create static files from it.
That way you can grab the head section of your WordPress site (scripts and all) and dump it into another piece of software. This allows things like widget areas, plugin functionality etc. to be transferred across to the other software dynamically. If you alter a widget area on your WordPress powered site, that will be displayed automagically in the other software. The advantage of doing it this way is that you don’t have the negative impacts of bogging the server down as if you did it with deep integration with bbPress, plus it works with other software as well, not just bbPress/WordPress.
This is the second complaint I’ve received about the instructions so I’ll try to improve them. I thought it was fairly straightforward though. I can’t think of an easier way to explain than how I did on the page, but I’ll do my best I’m quite busy right now so it may not be for a few weeks at least.
From what I’ve heard, there may be an error in the instructions too so I’ll need to sort that out when I rewrite them (I think one of my function names my be incorrect in the instructions but don’t have time to deal with that right now).
This is now been released as a beta and includes a lot of improvements.
http://pixopoint.com/products/pixopoint-theme-integrator/
You can see another example of it in action on the GreekBerry forum (case study). It would be great to see an example of it in use with bbPress too
I was a bit baffled by this too, but when I brought it up in the IRC chat, most seemed to think it was a better idea to slowly integrate bbPress into WordPress. I thought that would be far more difficult than starting from scratch, but there were a few people in the chat who know far more than I about such things who thought that was an easier approach, so I’m willing to take their word for it.
Since it looks like the move to WordPress isn’t coming any time soon, I’m working on ways to make it easier to integrate WordPress themes into bbPress 0.9 and 1.0 (and any newer versions) without taking a performance hit like you do with deep integration. I’d rather be developing plugins for bbPress, but as pointed out above, there’s not much point developing plugins for a moving target.
Hi Matt,
I launched the SitePoint community theme project for bbPress (work is still underway):
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/08/05/we-want-you-join-the-sitepoint-communitys-bbpress-theme-project/
My own background is in HTML/CSS coding mixed with a little WordPress.
Assuming the SitePoint project goes to plan I’ll likely be implementing it into a new version of my bbPress template generator which is currently in the works (albeit development is taking longer than I’d like) … http://pixopoint.com/products/bbpress-forum-theme-generator/
I see the key to bring bbPress to the masses is to add a lot of the standard functionality which most forums have by default directly into the theme. This keeps the core nice and light whilst offering maximum functionality to those who require it. I’d also like to make it easy as possible to have your WordPress and bbPress themes seamless integrate their designs by offering identically behaving WordPress and bbPress template generators.
Justin, couldn’t you just add something into every child theme which made it automatically load the parent theme’s “theme”? Would only take a single require to load the parent theme into I’d have thought … says the person who knows infinitely less about PHP than you do :p
Sam told me this is a throwback to some of the older versions of the software. Hopefully it will be fixed in a future version of bbPress.
Does anyone know how to do this?
If you don’t integrate the users database then bbPress will only be installed in it’s own section of the database, or it could have an entirely separate database so if you do it that way then it’s just a matter of deleting the bbPress specific bits.
If you integrate the user tables then the two sets of users will be merged and removing the bbPress added users could be quite time consuming if you have many forum users. I assume (not 100% sure here) that the only way to remove them would be to manually remove them or to rebuild the WP ones from scratch.
Any tips on the best way to create <b>bbPress</b> theme options pages? Any example themes out there?
According to _ck_ bbPress is faster. According to Sam phpBB is “probably” faster in some situations, in others bbPress is faster. In most situations I’d assume bbPress would load paages faster simply because it generally has a lot less to do, both content wise (less features = less HTML/CSS) and processing wise. The only way to tell would be to bench test two identical setups, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing that before.
In most practical situations I doubt the performance issues are a real issue though. The way you code your theme will probably have more effect on page load times than anything in the backend.
This is all just guess work though.
Hmm, well this all sounds promising’ish.
I asked Sam Bauers at WordCamp NZ how bbPress would compare speed-wise and server resource wise to other standard forum softwares like phpBB, SMF, vBulletin etc. He said that the others were probably faster on a shared hosting environment, but when mem-caching is running that bbPress leaps ahead in performance. Sam, perhaps you were referring to forums which REQUIRE mem-cache (ie: super large forums) running better on bbPress than the other softwares?
At any rate it sounds like for my purposes that I shouldn’t worry about these things too much and just stick with using it straight out of the box.
Hmm, showing my total ignorance of caching here …
I assumed memcaching was the best way to improve the performance of bbPress and WordPress on a server even if it was only on a single server. So if I have a VPS, what specifications should I request to make sure it runs at maximum efficiency?
I”ve been contemplating moving to a 512 MB VPS and requesting they install mem cache on it for me. But juding by _ck_’s comments above that would be a stupid thing to do.
Any opinions?
Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper and faster to use a VPS than a teeny tiny dedicated server?
You would need to iframe it to do that. A basic include would not work in that way.
