[chrishajer]

Earlier I tagged this a BBMU, which is sort what this was sounding like, bbPress Multi User (like WPMU.) That way, you have one installation to update, but multiple blogs (or in this case, forums.)

I don’t think that is currently possible. There was some work involved to create WPMU, although it reuses a great bit of WordPress code.

So, I think you are stuck using multiple installations of bbPress, or just using the built in Forums that exist in bbPress. If you use the built in forums that exist, then you don’t have to worry about logins working in all forums. The logins will work in all forums because it’s all just one forum.

But, to have multiple bbPress installations, but just one user database, you might want to investigate the advanced database options upon installation, in step two where they talk about user integration.

Custom user tables

Only set these options if your integrated user tables do not fit the usual mould of wp_user and wp_usermeta.



User database "user" table

The complete table name, including any prefix.



User database "user meta" table

The complete table name, including any prefix.

I think here you would be able to enter the same settings for every installation of bbPress to point them all to the same user database. You could try it with two forums to see if that works.

Also, managing 10 forum installations is not too bad if you have command line access to use something like subversion. Then it’s just a matter of doing an svn up or svn sw and accessing the update in a browser. You can do 10 or 20 installations pretty quickly. It’s even faster when there are no database changes. Then it’s just svn updates.