Hi Travis,
Thanks for the response. My theme was different, as you had suggested, and I am working on it. Although I’m now in a little bit more of a complicated predicament because I am trying to use bbpress through buddypress, and on the buddypress install the forums options is not pointing the indicated page to the bbpress forums.
Anyway, I did misread or misunderstand your first suggestion – sorry about that. As far as creating a full-width template, I am nearly positive I did so (I created a template specifically for that page to be full width), but nevertheless I will double check next time.
I don’t want to get too deeply into this, but the fact that we use the word “blog” and “forum” already indicates that they are different even though they are both CMS’s. The issue is not that one is a CMS and the other is not, it is a matter of how the content is managed and it’s purpose.
A blog is a blog because, generally, one user is contributing the content that a multiplicity of users is commenting on. So a standard blog Write-and-Respond system works nicely, and works nicely even in a narrow space because it usually contains one article with comments on the article.
A forum, on the other hand, is a multiplicity of users creating multiple threads all scaffolded by an overarching structure of the forum and subforums. The way forums have been built thus far has been usually in a wide content format so users can see 1) The Thread title 2) The amount of replies 3) The last user that replied etc. etc. In other words, it is build upon a more horizontal management format, whereas the blog can get away with a more vertical format.
Of course now and into the future there will be all sorts of variations on this. But for the end user, I want a forum that is a forum, not a forum that is a blog. In other words, wide-formatted with the expected information that forums have traditionally contained up to this point.
The strong point of bbpress is its integration and especially it’s style integration. Anyone who has attempted to create themes for phpBB knows what a nightmare it can be. However, if you try to smush a phpBB forum in-between two or even besides one sidebar, see what happens. Not only that, but those sidebars from the blog are almost inherently irrelevant to the function of the forum. In other words — useless screen real estate being taken from what otherwise would be a smoothly functioning, articulated forum.
And I can understand that WordPress vanilla functions fine, and being opensource one could reprogram it into Duke-Nukem 3D, almost. As a user of wordpress, the most frustrating thing consistently is that I feel like I am hacking CSS and PHP files more than I am creating content, and perhaps this is because I am a bit persnickety and want a particular look, but a full width forum from a forum plugin? To me things like this (and there are enough) are just plain flaws in development. I shouldn’t need to hack anything to get a forum to operate in full width because that is how forums best operate according to contemporary standards. Perhaps you should need to hack to get something to operate somehow unique and fascinating, but hacking code to get something to perform as you would expect it to – from your hours and hours and hours of forum experience? To me this is on the development teams shoulders.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to reply. I may be back after I have a chance to try what you had suggested.
By the way, after installing buddypress all of the groups, member pages, activity pages, etc. were ALL operating on full width. The only part of the entire install that persists in operating between my sidebars is bbpress, and it is the only one I am dissatisfied with. So now I have to go through hours of who knows what to get something working the way it always has worked.
Again, bravo for bbpress, it’s a great project with a great future, and there is a lot to be said for it. But that doesn’t excuse it from what needs work, and for those of us who want to deliver content, we would much rather spend our time on managing the delivery of content than on managing the content management system.
I’d rather be spending this time developing the forum, not on developing the forum development software.