Yep… early adopter blues indeed. But, I want things how I want them so, I’ll just have to deal with it!
SO in an effort to understand how integration should work, I’ve set up a fresh install of WP 3.1.2, ProfitsTheme, and bbPress. I want to have my coder attempt an integration on a totally clean slate and see what happens.
Problem is very strange now… if I try and access my bbP forums, I get “Error establishing a database connection” and that’s it. No idea why… any suggestions?
Thanks!
Jonathan
Is there by chance any info anyone can point me to on how exactly to make a theme bbP friendly? Since my theme is not based on TwentyTen even the tiniest bit, and is also nothing like the typical “blog” oriented theme, I’ve had to do tremendous amounts of code hacking to get the two to play together. But it sounds like the latest builds of bbP have added a lot of stuff for theme integration.
I’d really like to let one of my coders loose on a fresh install of my theme and the latest bbP, and have her integrate the two “properly” so that future updates to either of them will require a lot less manual hacking. I’m just not really even sure where to start, what files from the bbP theme are required, how to integrate them with my theme (since it doesn’t have the usual suspects like a header file, footer file, single-post file, etc. Nearly everything about it is dynamically generated by the theme admin panel in WP).
Just kinda desperate for a little guidance… thanks!!
Jonathan
Yes I really don’t see this as a real solution, but we are at a loss as to what is causing the problem. And it’s been very difficult for me to stay up on the latest bbP trunk because every time it updates I have to re-integrate all my changes.
Do you have any pointers at all on what we might need to look at? Right now starting over from scratch and figuring out how to re-integrate bbP with my theme isn’t really an option as it will take too long and potentially break too many things. But I have absolutely got to get topic creation working again, and fast…
Thanks,
Jonathan
Well the thing is, this theme is nothing like the typical WordPress theme. It’s a marketing theme specifically and can create single landing pages, squeeze pages, membership sites, minisites, sales pages, and a variety of other things. Oh yeah and it’ll make a blog too. But it’s so uber-functional that it doesn’t have any of the standard theme-fare, like a nice simple header.php, footer.php, single.php, etc. It’s something of a monster really.
I may try to add bbpress theme support to it at some point but actually I’ve spent over a month on this to get it to where it is, and just need to get my site live. Was probably slightly insane of me to choose an Alpha forum for my production site but hey… I like to live dangerously!
Thanks again, will keep poking around and trying to figure this issue out. If we were to leave it with the current “fix”, are there any dire consequences you can think of?
Jonathan
Nope, no private, no hidden.
Jonathan
Hah simultaneous post. 
It is a commercial theme, ProfitsTheme, that has had the twentyten bbP elements ripped out and put into it. I lovingly refer to it as FrankenTheme. 
But for the most part it’s working like a champ. Except for this…
It was working before just fine, then it didn’t so I updated to the latest trunk and re-integrated all my changes… then it worked great. Till today when it suddenly stopped again. Very confused…
Jonathan
OK, my coder commented out $r = bbp_exclude_forum_ids( $r ); in bbp_user_template.php but we don’t understand why that did the trick. Subscribers are now able to create topics and everything seems fine, but I’m hesitant to just semi-arbitrarily comment out something like that…
Jonathan
Even turning on anonymous posting didn’t work. I still get the “You must be logged in…” message.
Jonathan
I reactivated capsman just to see if it would help, but it doesn’t. Subscriber role users already have all the normal bbP capabilities, but still can’t create topics.
Seriously stumped… one of my coders has been hammering on this for hours and still has no idea what the trouble is.
Jonathan
I actually several days ago removed a plugin for managing capabilities, because I wasn’t actually using it. It was Capabilities Manager. But right now, no… nothing as far as I know.
Where does bbP handle what roles have permission to do what?
Jonathan
My previous problem of users not being able to creat topics, has suddenly returned and I don’t know why. When a user is looking at the topics, they see this at the bottom:
Sorry!
You cannot create new topics at this time.
Any idea what would be causing this??
Thanks,
Jonathan
@JJJ
I’m not entirely sure what he’s asking either, but he’s not a PHP guy so sometimes doesn’t follow all the coding needed.
What I’m trying to do is color the background of stickies & super stickies differently. He’s trying to figure out how to inject his required CSS into the specific posts that are either stick or super sticky, but not other posts. And I’m kinda the flip side of him in that I’m a PHP guy but CSS mostly just confuses the hell out of me. So we’re kinda both not sure what the other needs. LOL
Not sure if this helps, but if you can shed any more light it would be great. I’ll also ask him to clarify what exactly he’s stuck on.
Thanks,
Jonathan
EDIT: OK it turns out he DID think I was asking him how to create stickies in the first place. Didn’t realize I just needed them colored and they were already there. So… I think we’re all good now.
CORRECTION to my previous post – it may have been a problem of type. My coder did this to solve:
$forum_ids = array_merge( (array)$private, (array)$hidden );
Also regarding my question about styling stickies, got this question from my designer:
“bbP Team –
With regards to adding the .sticky classes to important posts, (‘They are .sticky and .super-sticky respectively’), how would one then go about isolating a specific post? I am currently going through the loop-forums and loop-topics.php files, and while I see where the tables are being generated, the topics themselves are being generated seemingly dynmically through PHP.. so how would I go about selecting/isolating a specific topic/<tr> that I would like to apply the .sticky class to??”
Any light you can shed on this JJJ or anyone else?
Thanks!
Jonathan
It appears that if either $private or $hidden come back empty, then the errors I was experiencing occur. We’re just going to check if they are empty to fix it.
Jonathan
OK here’s a weird one for you… trunk 3127, I’m getting an error that is displaying where one of my sidebar widgets would normally appear, but ONLY if not logged in:
Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array in /home/vanclute/public_html/wp-content/plugins/bbpress/bbp-includes/bbp-forum-functions.php on line 799
Trying to see if it’s something on my end but so far I don’t think it is…
Jonathan
@JJJ
Awesome, passing that on to my designer now. Thanks so much, you rock
Jonathan
P.S.
Updating to latest trunk now, and so far my “can’t post new topics” problem appears to have gone away.
Hey real quick, can anyone tell me if there’s a CSS class associated with stickies & super-stickies? I’d like to color them differently so they stand out. Anyone know?
Thanks!
Jonathan
OK this is weird, users can’t create topics in my forums anymore. When they try, the page refreshes and they’re just shown their same topic creation form with their content still in it, but nothing is ever created.
Also, I can’t create a topic that contains apostrophes or quotes in the title or body. They come back escaped, and when I try to save again, it escapes again, ad infinitum! Is there something crazy going on with a sanitization routine or something?
Not sure if these two issues are related but if anyone can steer me in the right direction on either of them, I’d sure appreciate it. I thought I was ready to go live but wouldn’t you know it… 11th hour troubles!
Jonathan
P.S.
This is only referring to creating topics via the normal front-end of the site. I can create them in the admin backend just fine.
P.P.S.
Replies work just fine, it’s only creating topics that users are unable to do.
@Christopher Jon
Thanks for the quick fix!!!
Yeah I didn’t exactly expect a “yes” to #1. I just wish it had SOME kind of unique moniker we could all adopt to refer to it ass… “bbPp2” maybe, or something. ANYTHING! There’s actually more stuff about it than you might expect, it’s just super duper hard to find.
Deactivating the forums could work I suppose, hadn’t thought of that. Maybe temporarily re-slug the page containing it and put up a “Down for Maintenance” page instead under the old slug. That would probably work nicely now that I think about it.
Glad (sortof anyway to hear I’m not the only one who saw the missing Forums in the menus page. I’m potentially days away from my site going live and I really need to add a few forums to my nav, so I hope you might be able to track this one down fast.
Thanks as always for the speedy response!
Jonathan
A few things…
1. Crazy suggestion, could we please please rename the “bbPress Plugin” to something else? When attempting to google for information on issues surrounding it, it’s effectively impossible since all you get is “standalone” bbP info. Them sharing the same name when they are utterly different things, is a real drag. I realize this has been discussed elsewhere and is rather hotly debated, personally I suggest it ONLY to make finding information in search engines actually somewhat possible.
2. Is there or could there be a way to “lock” the entire forum, in case of maintenance etc.? I don’t want to lock down my entire site, just the forum, in case I have to do some hacking & slashing and don’t want anyone posting new forum content while I do so. Suggestions?
3. I can’t seem to add Forums as WP menu items. What’s really odd is I’ve clearly done it before, as I have over a dozen items all labeled “Forum” in my WP nav hierarchy in the Menus page. But now, I’m unable to figure out how to add forums or topics to the WP nav. What am I missing here?
Thanks everyone, here’s to 1.0!!
Jonathan
OK, strike my previous… I see that users can in fact mark items as favorites or subscribe, but only from within the actual topic replies themselves. I was looking for a higher-level icon/button of some kind like I had found previously when poking around in the code.
Now that I know better how it actually work, this will do the basic job. Would be nice to be able to mark actual forums as favorites too though.
Thanks!
Jonathan
Now that I’m looking into this again, I don’t even see a loop-topics.php file so I’m not sure what I was talking about back then. Still, my desire to enable these features is the same.
Jonathan
I mentioned this in an earlier post but forgot to follow up on it.
There doesn’t seem to be a way for users to mark posts as favorites or subscribe to them. I see the functionality is there, but the actual buttons that give people the ability to use these features, are not visible anywhere in a bbP forum. From my earlier post:
“I hard-edited loop-topics.php to force those options to display and sure enouogh there are buttons for those things, but they never show up. Why is that? I’ve currently got two different plugins to try to achieve this functionality and it would be WAY better if it’s already built in, as it seems to be!”
Would love some insight into how to get these features to appear in normal forum use.
Thanks!
Jonathan
@JJJ oops, sorry my bad. Wasn’t trying to link but didn’t think about the post turning it into a link. That site is the theme I’m using, not a bbPress install, but I’m using it inside bbP and it’s working great (which is somewhat surprising given the complexity of it all). I’ll edit that post if I can.
BTW, with regards to the super sticky… it appears to be working again. Not sure why, don’t believe I changed anything but… it’s behaving as expected so I can’t complain. Go figure!
@Arjun – this is great, going to check out your sig plugin immediately. This is one of the last major “must have” features that I wanted before my forum goes live. Thanks for doing it!
Jonathan
