[David]

Thanks @Martin_C! I’m out of the studio this week but I’ll try it next week and report back.

@johnjamesjacoby, I’ll check back with you next week about access as well.

[David]

@ohmydarling, before you take more work-intensive steps I would start by deleting the specific forum in which the topics aren’t showing up. Then recreate the forum and reenter any topics you want to be back in that forum. As I mentioned above, that worked for me.

I did notice that the forum in which I was having trouble included topics that I had created in the WP admin vs in the forum front-end so you might try just using the front-end to create forums for now and see if that helps.

[David]

@johnjamesjacoby, I don’t know that it would help but would you be interested in looking at my bbPress instance? I have a live and a development space so there would be room for experimentation. If so, I PM’d you recently on BuddyPress so you could respond to that.

[David]

@johnjamesjacoby, it looks like your last response here was deleted so I’m pasting it back in from the email notice:

Here’s something to try:

1. Do you have customized topic tag slugs?

2. When you view a topic-tag, is the correct slug being used?

3. What happens if you replace what you see, with either ‘topic-tag’ or your custom slug?

1. I’m not using any custom slugs, so for topic tags it is the standard “topic-tag”.

2. That is correctly being displayed in the slug, so: /forums/topic-tag/monday-night-football.

3. I tried replacing “topic-tag” with “tags”. It displays correctly as the slug but it still pulls up all the topics instead of only those with the specified tag.

Let me know if I can give you any more details.

[David]

@anointed, to be clear, it was actually *topics* rather than topic tags that I added from the admin that were potentially causing that side issue I mentioned.

I hadn’t tried it yet but it’s good to know definitively that twentyten does the same thing. Based on what you mentioned earlier in this post I assumed that was the case.

[David]

I’ll think on it more but the basics are that I have a customized bbPress theme installed as a child theme in wp-content/themes/ . This is a copied and modified version of bbPress’ base theme (I included all the theme files since I’ve needed to get into a lot of them). I’ve renamed that bbPress child theme (and its directory) bbps.

All the topics are entered via the front-end forum vs the admin panel.*

Finally, I don’t know that the tag archive was ever working correctly on these sites and then stopped. I’ve only seen it print all the topics instead of the respective tag’s topics.

For now I’m still accepting tags on new topics but I’m not displaying them on the single topic listing or the single topic edit page. If there was a way to remove the A tags from the tag list outside of core code I would do that so that I could at least display the tags in the short-term but it’s not a primary need.

If I can answer more questions about my installs let me know.

*I had an issue with a couple topics that I had started in the WP forum admin that was resolved after I deleted those and re-entered them through the forum itself, so I’ve stuck with that approach for now. The issue, as an aside, was that the topics were reflected in the Forum Archive topics count for each forum but the forum’s page showed no topics and the topic’s pages were 404.

[David]

Great. Thanks!

[David]

Thanks for the heads up, @anointed.

I’m running bbPress 2.0 with WordPress 3.2.1.

[David]

I believe the only options available in shortcodes are for [bbp-single-forum id=$forum_id] and [bbp-single-topic id=$topic_id].

I agree that (a lot) more would be very useful.

[David]

One cool option I forgot to mention earlier…

If it’s important for you to have the topics of each forum listed on your forum index page you can call them individually by using a shortcode for a particular parent forum (in this case, using WP’s do_shortcode):

<?php echo do_shortcode('[bbp-single-forum id=1234]') ?>

where 1234 is the ID number of the parent forum. I’ve experimented with this for a *Category* type parent forum and it works well. I imagine it would do the same thing for a *Forum* type parent forum. You’d obviously want to lead it with a header title for the parent forum.

Call each parent forum this way and you’ve got a nicely organized index page. (NOTE: you can call individual (non-parent) forums this way too but by default they call the entire single forum template part that includes the form. If you’re interested in messing with this it’s handled in [your bbPress directory]/bbpress/content-single-forum.php.)

The disadvantage is that it’s built manually for each parent so any new parent forums will have to added manually as well, but you do have a lot of control.

[David]

@LifeFreeOrDie, I can’t answer your question completely but maybe I can give you a little help.

You can order your forums by defining the Order in the respective Forum’s admin page. Counting starts at 0, which is the default.

Creating sub-forms is simply a matter of creating a parent forum and then for each child (sub-) forum make that parent forum the Parent in Forum Attributes. (Parents that are defined as type Forums can contain their own topics but parents that are Categories only contain other forums.)

Unfortunately, in the forums index sub-forums are necessarily presented with their topic and reply counts in parenthesis as defined in bbp_list_forums() in loop-single-forum.php. What’s worse: there is no containing element around the count so it’s not possible to style those separately from the sub-form name. [@johnjamesjacoby or other admin: Can this be updated outside of core code?]

However, you can style the sub-forums with CSS as they are listed as a

.

[David]

@alieninformer, thanks for sharing!

You can also call an alternate sidebar in bbPress just as you can in your base WP install, so <?php get_sidebar('alternateside'); ?> would call sidebar-alternateside.php and that file can be kept in the WP theme folder so that it could be shared with other non-bbPress pages.

[David]

I had a different but potentially related issue in which I noticed that if I deleted and recreated a forum and only added topics from the public-facing forum page the issue went away.

I don’t know that this would help you but since you’ve already gone so far in your trouble-shooting as you have I’d be interested in seeing if your problem was resolved by having forums without any admin-added topics. If it helps then I think that would point to a bug in the admin-added topics.

By the way I’m assuming you’re using bbPress 2.0 (the plugin).

[David]

@Trobee, are you able to view each Topic’s page (and it’s just empty)? Also, did you add the Topics via the admin or from the front-end form?

[David]

I’d rather do it with a template tag but I did realize that I can use the shortcode and do_shortcode to pull topics by forum on the forums index:

<?php echo do_shortcode('[bbp-single-forum id=$forum_id]') ?>

For those who are interested but not completely clear, a forum’s id can be found easily by viewing the source code in your browser and looking for the id or class of a forum listing’s containing element (for example: id=”bbp-forum-2536″ or class=”post-2536″).

[David]

That helps me too @anointed. Thanks.

To take that further, is it possible to organize the topics by forum? For instance, in a sports forum could I pull all topics from the NBA forum and then the NFL, NHL, and so on? It would obviously be great to be able to do that in one call but I’d be willing to manually call them in order at this point as well.

[David]

bbPress templates can’t be selected from the admin as they can, for instance, for a WP page. bbPress looks for the following template files in your *main* WP theme directory in the following order:

1. bbpress.php

2. forum.php

3. page.php

4. single.php

5. index.php

Most themes are going to have page.php by default so it’s likely that bbPress is pulling that as the forums page template. Copying and renaming that to bbpress.php or forum.php will allow you to customize a forum-only page template. NOTE: this is the containing page template (just like for WP pages) and is *not* where you will edit the forum files themselves.

[David]

@Nate, @johnjamesjacoby has posted instructions on theme customization (and a lot of discussion has followed) at:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-20-theme-compatibility

In terms of page templates, bbPress looks for the following in your main WP theme directory (in this order):

1. bbpress.php

2. forum.php

3. page.php

4. single.php

5. index.php

[David]

nthfamous, bbPress looks in your active theme directory for a template from the following (in this order):

1. bbpress.php

2. forum.php

3. page.php

4. single.php

5. index.php

In other words, if you don’t have a bbpress.php present then it will look for forum.php, and then page.php and so on. Page.php is a standard so if you haven’t added any forum specific files already that’s probably what’s being called.

[David]

I’m looking for the same thing.