[Josh Leuze]

Thanks for the info _ck_, glad to hear that I’m not way off track.

Yeah, I have been loading the sidebar after the content, but just above the footer include, rather than in the footer, so that I can use different sidebars easily.

I wouldn’t want to take credit for Ryan Imel’s work! Only linked to Theme Playground as an example, but you’re right, he did an awesome job on integrating the forums into the rest of his site.

Now that I scroll down and read the comments on his post a little closer, I see that Justin Tadlock mentioned another way to add a sidebar, but it looks to have the same end result as a regular include:

require_once( bb_get_template( 'sidebar.php' ) );

I’m not sure if I can match Ryan’s quality design, but I’m going to try to do a few fresh looking bbPress themes to share with the community.