[chrishajer]

Having run sites with WordPress, bbPress and Joomla, I have had less security issues with WordPress and never one with bbPress. bbPress is certainly less used, so it’s less of a target (like Apple for viruses, for example.) WordPress security releases seem to be fixed fairly quickly. There was an update this week to 2.8.6 for example, to fix some security issues.

I’ve done 3 sites with Joomla and about 40 sites with WordPress, and 3 bbPress forums. I would never recommend Joomla to anyone either.

Drupal had too steep a learning curve for me, and with 2.9 WordPress is adding custom post types, which was a strong point for Drupal in the past.

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9

I would use WordPress. But before you install bbPress, define what you want in your forum installation, and post that here. Integration is not a strong point with bbPress and WordPress right now. If you desire integrated logins between WordPress and bbPress, you might want to consider a WordPress forum plugin instead of bbPress.

[jefferisp7]

Hi folks,

I created a website for my wife ( http://www.tackypolice.com) which she, as a school teacher, is always too busy to moderate and update. Unfortunately, Joomla is a security nightmare if you have forums on it. Every update to its community builder produces 1500 attempts by russian hackers to register or worse. It seems that somehow they know immediately if an update is applied to patch something.

Fortunately, I can check these names against known forum spammers:

http://www.stopforumspam.com but it is not automatic.

I am so disgusted with this labor that I’d like to move to what seems to be more secure: WordPress. The interface would be easier to use for my wife.

But I have a few questions:

If you use a Forum on a WordPress site, are you any better off or are you going to encounter the same spam/hacker problem that will require constant manual oversight?

Is there a way to preserve and transfer your valid user database and forums and posts to the new service?

I wonder if joomla is targeted more just because it is a known security sieve…

Or would anyone recommend Drupal or something else instead for some of these issues?

After this experience, I would never recommend Joomla to anyone. What a time waster.

Thanks

Jeff

[Sushubh]

well its hard to restrict the title limit on a community. twitter is hard enough to manage with a limit.

i was actually surprised that no one has had this issue and there were no plug-ins either.

well words would be fine. 3-4-5 to keep the link short and sweet. of course i am not looking for a wordpress like slug feature. but a vbseo like fixed limit on the number of words.

[paamayim]

The .htaccess trick worked for me, thanks.

Just ensure to edit the .htaccess inside bbpress folder ( /forum/ ? ) not the one in wp folder, and add the line suggested by “balgo” at the top of the file replacing your domains/folder where stated.

[chrishajer]

I think with any sort of forum software where there exists no conversion software that you are going to need to write the SQL to grab the information you have, massage it, and insert it into WordPress. I don’t think it will be hard work, but it will be some work.

[Elunah]

Hi, there! I had this error, too, and I think I might know what it is. You mentioned that all users already have nicenames. What link structure are you using? Try switching permalinks to “None” (the default) and seeing if the profiles work. If they do, then that means that you need to manually edit your users’ nicenames in the WordPress database. The nicenames must match the display usernames of the users.

An alternative solution is to use 301 redirects in your .htaccess to redirect profile links. The profiles of those users whose profiles are broken actually do exist. Try replacing the part of the URL that contains their username with their user_nicename. You may find that they exist, so you can do redirection if you’re afraid of messing with the mySQL. This is definitely the inferior solution, though. Editing the nicenames in the mySQL shouldn’t cause problems.

[topguntoronto]

I checked my WP its Version 2.8.6 bottom right corner in dashboard. I used the automatic update. If it didnt update correctly can I do a manual update? what should I delete & keep so I dont ruin my setup..

I checked the wp_config sample & this is what is in there…

<?php

// ** MySQL settings ** //

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database

define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username

define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password

define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);

define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix

$table_prefix = ‘wp_’; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!

// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the

// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.

// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to ‘de’

// to enable German language support.

define (‘WPLANG’, ”);

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define(‘ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__).’/’);

require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-settings.php’);

?>

Thanks

Cold in Toronto

[topguntoronto]

I`m not seeing these files in my word press config file(below), I have installed the integration plugin for WP and gone to configure it. I have deleted my cookies in firefox, I do see them in my BB_press config file. I upgraded my WP to 2.8.6 & have installed the 1.0.2 version of bb-press.

WordPress bbPress

AUTH_KEY <=> BB_AUTH_KEY

SECURE_AUTH_KEY <=> BB_SECURE_AUTH_KEY

LOGGED_IN_KEY <=> BB_LOGGED_IN_KEY

Also I have seen on the forum I should not use WWW in my urls, why is this & what should the format of the urls be, does this apply to all urls used in WP/BB press

Thanks

Cold in Canada

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

I have a tutorial for that coming online on my series WP as CMS on my blog – http://blog.ashfame.com/2009/11/wordpress-cms-series/

I will be demonstarting how to do it without deep integration. You might want to check that out if you are comfortable with code and love to do it yourself

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

The best thing that could happen with bbPress is having _ck_ on the dev team. I am a freelancer web developer who uses WordPress & bbPress to power sites. So xHTML/CSS & PHP is my cup of tea. Getting close to being proficient in PHP. I would like to develop more plugins for bbPress (3 tiny ones so far)

[lukeah]

yeah im stupid. can anyone tell im a newb

[circuit]

i upgraded bbpress and converted wordpress to MU, then added buddypress on top. i didn’t run into any major issues, but then again, i made sure to back up before i made any major changes to the database, so a few disasters were avoided that way

[circuit]

“the latest forum posts on the right hand side are visable on your wordpress pages. Was this achieved by calling bbpress header after wp header?”

no, it’s a plugin called bbpress latest discussions.

i dislike unhelpful meanies who hang around on techy forums, and i don’t mean to be one of them, but you honestly need to search the forum (and google) because the answers are out there! if you don’t do the research you’re going to waste time on things that have been done for you already.

just migrating my wordpress+bbpress install to MU+buddypress+bbpress took me around 30 hours. that’s not including the initial setup of wordpress+bbpress, or the re-theming of template files to acommodate the upgrade. most of that 30 hours was spent searching google for plugins and hacks and reading around.

thanks for the compliments on my site. believe me, i am not a coder, i am just persistent!

[lukeah]

When installing bbpress (for wordpress integration) i changed the bbpress url to /forum instead of /bbpress (they say there guess is usually correct, but you can change if you like) not realising that i would screw everything up by doing so. Now when i try to login to bbpress i get a big 404 error. I can manually replace /forum with /bbpress and it sort of works, but when i try to login i reverts back to /forum/whatever and i get the error again. How do i change this back to /bbpress so everything works? I looked in config.php, and setting.php but could not find the path or whatever it is that i need to change.

http://plocaclimbing.com/bbpress/

[jameschacks]

Thanks for the quick response, i’m looking at just transfer of the posts to WordPress not just synchronizing.

[hatter]

Are you trying to synchronize posts between the two, so that you can continue the discussion in the forum? If so, you can use the plugin found here: http://bobrik.name/code/wordpress/wordpress-bbpress-syncronization/ Or are you just trying to transfer from bbPress into WordPress completely?

[jameschacks]

Has anyone been successful in transfering data/posts from BB Press to WordPress. Infact I had a PHPBB3 and wanted to convert to WordPress, and I found a script and was successful in transferring the whole to BB Press, but finally I would want it to be on Word Press. Can someone plz help me out.

[Doobus]

Funny thing is that is what I’m planning on delving into next. I’m new to bbPress but decided to try it out because I was familiar with WordPress. I don’t have any formal training in code, I’ve pretty much just learned by piecing things together and seeing if they work.

Back to my original train of thought, I’m planning on implementing something like queries, which I think is what you mean by loop of topics. I was actually browsing around the forums looking for ways to pull related topics together not by keywords but by relation to forums. I plan on putting this within the topics template to display similar topics to members. Will definitely be looking for help on that one as I’m sure it won’t be as easy to implement as in WordPress.

I was planning on using <?php if (in_category() ): ?>, that is what I used in WordPress to pull similar posts together. However I’m wondering if this approach is possible in bbPress because I’m not sure if there is such a thing as in_category. I guess this will be another thing to get into. Will check back after I take a much needed rest. Thanks again.

[chrishajer]

What version of WordPress are you using? There are cookie incompatibilities between various versions.

To clear your cookies, it depends on your browser and operating system, but it’s usually an Options or Preferences menu item, then something like Privacy, and there should be a cookies option where you can clear the cookies. Or just try a completely new browser, one you’ve never visited the site with before, and see if you have the same trouble. It won’t have any existing cookies to worry about. There are lots of free browsers out there that install pretty easily.

[Shoemakersp]

Well I am back to square 0.8. As of this morning I was on bbPress 1.0.2, but now I am back to 0.9.0.4. It is at least working again. I think it must have something to do with the bb-config.php file. If I load up 1.0.2 and keep the old config file (as instructed) it tells me that my usernames do not exist (admin, etc.). If I pull everything (including the same bb-config.php file) from my backup and switch back to 0.9.0.4 everything is fine. I did notice that everything in the newer versions of wp and bb refers to the four different keys, whereas my config file for bb has only the “SECRET” key. In the old version it talks about WP integration using just the one key.

Any ideas on how I should proceed? Also I see many mentions on clearing out the wp and bb cookies, but I don’t understand how to do that and can’t find it in the forum.

[chrishajer]

There’s no equivalent that I know of for bbPress. It would be the equivalent of a WordPress blog post page, where you want 9 posts (for example) listed as a default, but if there is a long post, some sort of limit kicks in. I don’t know of a way to do this in WordPress at all, other than limiting the number of posts on a blog page, or with a custom query. The nextpage tag only works on a single long post. It’s possible you could change the number of replies listed in bbPress when it encounters a long post with a tag like that, but I haven’t seen anyone do that yet.

[Doobus]

I guess I made it a little confusing with the category reference to WordPress.

You’re on the right track, but what I’m looking for is detecting what forum a topic is in, this will be used by title in the front_page as well the titles in the topic_pages.

Illustration:

---

Topic Title

File under: Forum 1

---

Making the forum link linkable would be ideal as well. Thanks.

[Doobus]

Hatter thanks for the lesson, even though most of it was above my head I’m very grateful for your help. Btw your code worked like a charm.

I feel like an a** since I’ve been littering these boards with newb questions. With that said, I was wondering if you could help me with another minor thing that I have been trying to figure out. In WordPress you can call the_category(); which indicates which category the post is in. I’ve been searching the forum and there was one person who asked the same question but didn’t get a reply can this be done?

Sorry for hijacking my own post .

[Doobus]

A bit surprised no one has chimed in yet, didn’t think it was that difficult to achieve.

Anyways here is the code that I found in another thread:

<?php

function get_post_teaser($chars = 200){

global $bbdb;

$topic_id_ft = get_topic_id(); //topic id for getting text of first post of the topic

$first_post = (int) $bbdb->get_var("SELECT post_id FROM $bbdb->posts WHERE topic_id = $topic_id_ft ORDER BY post_id ASC LIMIT 1");

$content = substr(strip_tags(strip_shortcodes(get_post_text($first_post))),0, $chars); //gets the first 200 chars of the post

return $content;

}

?>

I figured it’s the same basis, however since I’m pretty much brain dead in regards to php I can’t for the life of me make the post_text show fully. This code strips out html code so links don’t show, how can the code be altered to allow html? I figure this code is similar to WordPress’ content_excerpt. If there is another way, I’m open to suggestions.

Sorry for all the newbie questions, I assure you I’ve tried my best to track down my issues in the forum search before asking my questions, unfortunately due to lack of a codex and documentation I’m pretty much at a lost.

[spartanburgspark]

I had a similar problem the first time I integrated a bbPress and WordPress site. In my case, all I had to do was clear the old bbPress and WordPress cookies, and next login went fine. Maybe give that a try?