[@thomasw98 Member 18 years ago]

Got it. Cool. I registered it last night and now google has indexed all of the topics. So now if I run a search in google on one of my topics (in quote marks to make the search more specific), it comes up right away.

But it doesn’t seem to index the actual contents of the topics…at least not yet. I am guessing it will do this over time.

Thanks again!

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years ago]

No, it’s been up for more than a month. I tried something new yesterday by adding a sitemap (see another thread in this forum). Within two hours they had indexed all of the topics. So there must have been some reason why google was not indexing it before. The sitemap solution solves the problem partially, but I think it means I have to resubmit the site map over and over again. I am not quite sure on this issue.

Still, though the sitemap method helps, I wonder what is stopping google from indexing the forum under normal conditions?

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years ago]

One more question: does your script just create the sitemap or does it also submit the sitemap to google?

I read in the links that you gave me above that there is a way to resubmit site maps using an http request (example: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url).

It would be great if this http request was part of the script actions, i.e. it would create the new sitemap AND resubmit updated map to google. Or maybe it is doing this already?

Thanks for the help “O’ Grey One”.

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years ago]

Yes, I think I have them set correct in the config file as:

// Set to true if you want pretty permalinks.

$bb->mod_rewrite = true;

My links look like the following example:

http://www.domain.com/forum/topic/70?replies=3

I think these are what they call “pretty permalinks”. But still Google ignores the entire /forum/ subfolder and does not index it. On the other hand, Google indexes the rest of the website very well including my blog which is using WordPress.

For the record, I have already checked to be sure the robots.txt file is not blocking spider access to the /forum/ subfolder.

Any other ideas anyone???

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years ago]

Thanks for the suggestion. One question: The site map that it generates appears to only cover the forum pages and posts, while leaving out the rest of my website (my regular non-forum pages are the typical company intro, about, contact, services, etc. pages. Plus I also have a blog).

If I advise Google that this is my sitemap, will that then imply that the rest of my website should be ignored by Google? That would not be good.

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years ago]

Hey Ear1grey: Thanks for the script. I installed it in my forum and it works like a charm, i.e. it creates the site map. Now, what happens next, I have no idea…I assume something good will come from this in terms of google indexing (I just posted a new thread elsewhere about google spiders not indexing any of my forum posts). Anyways, it is nice to install something that works right the first time.

One note to others: When you download the text file of the script, be careful to double check that there are no blank spaces after the final “?>” at the end of the script. These sometimes will appear if you copy and paste from the text file rather than download and save. If you have any blank spaces after the “?>”, then you should delete those spaces. Otherwise you will have lots of interesting errors when you run the script.

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 1 month ago]

I agree that email notification is really needed.

In the meantime, I have added a Feedblitz signup box to my front page. The user enters their email address, so it is more user friendly, i.e. the concept of signing up with your email address is already familiar to most. Also, once they go through setup at the Feedblitz site, Feedblitz sends them emails when anything on my forum is updated.

Granted, that’s not the same thing as email notification, but at least it is close.

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

Looks very good. I like the sports theme and especially the way you executed it in a simple but memorable manner. This approach perfectly matches the “simple but elegant” slogan of bbPress.

I am not as good as you are at coming up with a nice looking theme (plus mine is a business site, so slightly more serious topic), so I just modified the standard header and colors a bit. But I still like my new bbPress forum much better than my former YABB forum system. YABB was somewhat slow for me, but the biggest problem was that it was nearly ignored by every search engine. On the other hand, my WordPress blog is very well indexed by the main search engines and I am hoping that bbPress will have the same results.

thomas at innovatize dot com slash forum

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

Actually, that’s what I assumed also by the name “deleted.alt”…but I could not find anywhere else to adjust the colors on the front page “latest topics” and “forums” list, so finally i changed the color number for “deleted.alt” and lo and behold, the colors on the front page also changed.

Of course, the topics and forums on the front page are NOT deleted ones, so I guess this variable is shared somehow within the script (I assume it is shared by accident, hence the misleading title “deleted.alt”.)

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

That works perfectly. Thanks!

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

OK, I figured it out finally…you can control the color of these background fields on the front page by changing the color code in the style.css file at these lines:

.deleted.alt {

background: #ff9999;

}

Of course! “deleted.alt”…so obvious of a name for this option in the style sheets…why didn’t I think of this 9 hours ago!

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

You have to set the time clock correctly in config.php. You need to set the time difference between Greenwich mean time and the time zone of the location of your server. One way to do this is to go to the following website:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=179

The above link will take you to a page on which they show the time difference between Greenwich mean time and New York time. On the webpage, it shows:

Standard time zone: UTC/GMT -5 hours

Daylight saving time: +1 hour

Current time zone offset: UTC/GMT -4 hours

Which means that normally there is a -5 hour difference but now because of daylight savings time in New York, there is a -4 hour difference.

So then, I go into config.php and enter -4 in the following section:

// Your timezone offset. Example: -7 for Pacific Daylight Time.

$bb->gmt_offset = -4;

Save the modified config.php file and upload it to your server.

OK, that is what you should do, but of course, check the actual time difference to the location of your server (mine is in New York, but yours probably is not).

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

I am not sure what you mean by that, as I have never created a plug-in before. Anways, I gave it a try as follows:

Created a blank file with the following content:

<?php

function front_page_topics() {

$bb->page_topics = 2;

}

add_action( ‘bb_index.php_pre_db’, ‘front_page_topics’ );

?>

Then saved it as “latest-posts.php” and stored it in my newly created “my-plugins” folder.

But it did not seem to have any effect as the front page of the forum would still display more that 2 latest posts (I selected to limit the topics to 2 so it would be asier to test).

The only other thing I can think of is that this code needs to instead be added to one of the regular scripts, but I have no idea which one.

thanks,

thomas

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

that’s a good idea…rather than ban them and get them more upset, just let them rant away and wonder why nobody is responding to them. haha!

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

It’s actually not so difficult to delete them using PHPMyAdmin…and i am a relative newbie to this stuff.

If your server has cpanel, you select the SQL database menu as you would normally do to create a database (you did this already to set up the forum, right?). At the bottom of the page, there is usually a link to jump to PHPMyAdmin…which is basically a webpage that lets you access your database. From there, you can easily figure out how to browse your database and delete forums or whatever. You can even change user passwords here or add users and other interesting stuff much faster than doing it item by item through the admin pages.

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

omg…i spent 3 hours trying to find that. Thanks loads!

[@thomasw98 Member 18 years, 2 months ago]

Sometimes all of these comments are way over my head, so I have to just keep trying and trying…until I figure it out.

I kept having problems with this topic, until finally I figured out the the .htaccess file that should be changed was NOT the one that already existed in my www (root) folder but rather i had to create a NEW .htaccess file and store it in my forum subfolder.

I tried the suggested simple version first (i.e. “Options +MultiViews”), but it would not work on my server. I then used the more complex version to create a new .htaccess file with the following contents:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /forum/

RewriteRule ^forum/([0-9]+)/page/([0-9]+)$ /forum/forum.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^forum/([0-9]+)$ /forum/forum.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^topic/([0-9]+)/page/([0-9]+)$ /forum/topic.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^topic/([0-9]+)$ /forum/topic.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^tags/(.+)/page/([0-9]+)$ /forum/tags.php?tag=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^tags/(.+)/?$ /forum/tags.php?tag=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^tags/?$ /forum/tags.php [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^profile/([0-9]+)/page/([0-9]+)$ /forum/profile.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^profile/([0-9]+)/([a-z]+)$ /forum/profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^profile/([0-9]+)/([a-z]+)/page/([0-9]+)$ /forum/profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2&page=$3 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^profile/([0-9]+)$ /forum/profile.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^view/([a-z-]+)/page/([0-9]+)$ /forum/view.php?view=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^view/([a-z-]+)$ /forum/view.php?view=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^rss/$ /forum/rss.php [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^rss/forum/([0-9]+)$ /forum/rss.php?forum=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^rss/topic/([0-9]+)$ /forum/rss.php?topic=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^rss/tags/([a-z]+)$ /forum/rss.php?tag=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^rss/profile/([0-9]+)$ /forum/rss.php?profile=$1 [L,QSA]

</ifmodule>

You can see above that I already changed the “/path/to/bbPress/” part into “/forum/” as that is the name of the subfolder on my root directory in which I store my forum (your subfolder name is probably different, so be careful to use the correct name for YOUR subfolder, not mine!).

Put more simply, “forum” is the name of the subfolder in which config.php is stored. So…I created an empty .htaccess file, put the above noted gibberish into the file, then stored the file in the “forum” folder on my server where config.php is already stored.

Now it works like a charm!

Hope that helps some of my fellow newbies out there!