[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Psst! You mean to put bbpress here:

/home/www/example.com/bbpress

If you put it under wordpress, your URL will be http://www.example.com/wordpress/bbpress

[_ck_]

Oh one big thing I should point out – the features in bbPress, and the time of the main developers are first and primarily geared towards the need of Automattic and WordPress.org – people forget or don’t realize that.

Remember, bbPress is a purpose driven product that happens to also be open source. It wasn’t just a few people that said “hey let’s make a better free forum because we can”.

The features that are “missing” from bbPress just happen to be the features that Matt decided weren’t a priority for WordPress.org and the other Automattic forums. It’s also why there is no documentation, remember Matt has to pay the coders, why does he need documentation for 3rd party plugin developers if it’s just going to cost money.

bbPress 1.0 and the backpress integration are now being driven by Matt’s goal of TalkPress for WordPress.com members.

So there’s the logic that some might not understand without perspective. There are projects like SMF that literally WERE “let’s make a better free forum” that have matured now so you can compare to them – but remember they are half a decade old. bbPress is far younger (and bbPress is way easier to write mods for).

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

while ($stars_in_heavens) {

deadmedic.karma += extra_scoop_of_icecream();

deadmedic.praise_sung += 1;

}

You fixed it.

Here I was searching for all instances of setcookie…novice error!

WP2.6.3; bbPress 1.0a2; PHP5; Apache 1.3

I can log in and out of WP and bbPress from any direction!

I did not use the .htaccess edits, just the rtrim line.

Thank you, so very much!

I wonder if this is going to solve my bbSynch and bbLive issues?

BTW, there is a WP plugin to skin the wp login. They have a flickr group to share what people have done.

I like the idea of funneling registrations through bbPress, as most of my members will hit the fora.

I have to go and clean up some nasty things I’ve been saying around the web about integration…

Thanks again, man.

Cheers.

[mxadness]

A simple phpBB3 to bbPress converter would be great. I really hope this gets done soon — bbPress + WordPress absolutely rocks.

[chrishajer]

Put it in your root, but in a folder of its own. So, if you have WordPress here

/home/www/example.com/wordpress/

you can put bbPress here:

/home/www/example.com/wordpress/bbpress/

Then, your website/blog is http://www.example.com and your forum is http://www.example.com/bbpress/

You can call your folder whatever you want, it might be forum, forums, bbpress, anything at all.

[suzkaw]

I just ported the awesome iNove wordpress theme over to a bbPress template. Here is a link to download it and see a demo:

http://ericlbarnes.com/inove-for-bbpress/

Hope someone finds it useful!

[matteoraggi]

in installation manual is written to upload files, but not in which folder of wordpress, into plugins or content or on root or where?

[stevedrum]

as someone who has used phpbb 2, phpbb3, invision and many other smaller packages i was probably a little bit biased towards forums. but then i started blogging with wordpress, and hence to bbpress.

let me say first of all that i like bbpress. after using those other bloated packages for years, it’s refreshing to get back to what it’s all about: a lightweight forum that’s just for… talking.

but i agree with the guy who wrote the original post. there are some things that a forum package needs. using bbpress straight out of the box is like stepping back in time.

here are my personal bugbears…

1) guests need the ability to post. you can’t build up a forum from scratch without that — it’s near impossible. because no one bothers to sign-up until the forum is relatively busy.

2) you need some kind of permission system. otherwise how can you talk to the other moderators? there is no PM system (which is fine) — but the only way you can do it out of the box is by email. you need to be able to create a forum that only the moderators can see, and other stuff like that.

i haven’t looked at the new version you’re working on, so maybe they are included in the new one. but leaving stuff like that up to the plug-in makers is crazy. Not that the plugins wouldn’t work fine, because no doubt they would — but nobody could be certain that a plugin will still work when a new version comes out. it could potentially wreck the usability of your board.

i think when you leave simple stuff like that out all it does is put off the people who might otherwise be prepared to switch over from packages like phpbb.

i do like bbpress though, and i am still going to carry on using it. …so i say these criticisms with love!

[epiphone]

This is a interesting post.

Im currently running WP 2.5.1 and bbPress 0.9.2, and Im getting slightly worried on falling behind on WordPress upgrades. I think this the most success someones had with WP 2.7 and bbPress.

Im sure I’ve seen a WP 2.6.3 and bbPress 1.0.2 installation and it didn’t like it at all, sent out a redirect loop.

Thanks for sharing

[kevinjohngallagher]

Great answers again _CK_.

As always you bring an authoritative voice to this discussion.

“Tables have vertical rows that can be sorted which would be 100x times harder with lists. Javascript has specific abilities on tables that don’t exist in lists. Lists do not have vertical relationships between their “cells”.”

I’m going to be one of those guys here a sec and say you’re totally and utterly wrong about this.

The DOM of a browser treats a TABLE like an XML file that it iterates through in a singular parent/child relationship.

The DOM of a browser treats a LIST like an XML file that it iterates through in a singular parent/child relationship.

Both are sorted based on their parent AND their attributes.

The perception that tables are easily sorted natively by JavaScript is only brought to the fore because libraries such as jQuery etc. have built in functions to sort tables. The same underlying code works for lists in exactly the same way.

eg. The browsers DOM can’t tell the difference between:

TABLE

– TR

– – TH

– TR

– – TD

and

DIV

– DIV

– – DIV

– DIV

– – DIV

or

OL

– LI

– – SPAN

– LI

– – SPAN

Let me give you an example again; Back to the backpacker website (real world examples are good I find).

UK (Category)

– England

– – London

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

– Scotland

– – Edinburgh

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

– – Glasgow

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

Now if we output these as 1 flat tables (even with fancy CSS tags), and we use JavaScript to sort it (lets say alphabetically), we get this:

Edinburgh

England

Glasgow

Hostels

Hostels

Hostels

London

Scotland

Travel

Travel

Travel

UK (Category)

Because, again, if things are in a singular flat table structure there is not way of knowing which child belongs to which parent.

Again, i’m only advocating the use of lists for the forums, not the topic list, which is a singular list, and therefore well suited to using tabular data.

==============================================

What I want to stress here, because i’m feeling like i’m repeating myself a little and thats never good, is that i’m NOT here to get BBpress to change from tables to lists or divs or anything else.

What i’m here to discuss is that BBpress is going down a route, a route that solves one set of needs. Can you list the topics in a singular table in a singular order while the only differentiation between each row/cell is in the CSS worked out after the tag has been sent to the browser.

That is a very very singular way of doing things. My point is that all over the shop here in BBpress 1.0a we’re doing things in a singular method, and not in any way giving any for of extensibility to the software.

I use the forum parent/child output example cos it’s on the front page. I could use the example of having template functions HARD CODED in the bb-includes folder as opposed to being in the template folders. I could use the example of “forum” or “topic” being slapped before all the permalinks with no option to remove them.

Lets be honest here, in terms of changes from 1.0a1 to 1.0a2 the first 17 changes were style changes to the template file that we’re all (hopefully) going to replace with our own template.

The 3 latest changes to the repository have been to fix TYPOS in the comments.

There was 85 days, almost a 1/3 of a year between 0.9 release and 1.0alpha, and I may be wrong here but the biggest change seems to be that XML RPSeeWhoCaresAboutThisReally was added.

People are complaining about the same things on this board over and over. Most plug-ins were written over a year ago, and have been hacked to death. Vital information is stored on Page 3 of a forum thread started 18 months ago because no-ones updated the website.

Heck, saying that 0.9.0.2 the STABLE bbpress release doesn’t actually work with anything beyond 2.5.1 of wordpress, let alone the stable wordpress release of 2.6.3 ISN’T EVEN ON ANY OF THE WEBSITE PAGES. It’s stored on the forum software, in a random post.

This is not a complain against the great men and women who have done some marvellous work here, _CK_ so far is a screaming example of someone who’s given up huge amounts of time and created some amazing code, but come on.

If we try to develop something with no roadmap, no feature list; if we try to solve single problems with singular solutions; if we do this all with no documentation; heck if we do this with no project management whatsoever then we’ll end up with a bunch of things that look somewhere between a blog and a forum all with slightly different colours and a different header picture.

Then we can all pretend that we’ve build a totally extendable bit of software that every user has just decided to use exactly the same way out of pure luck, and not because they’re effectively forced to.

Heck while we’re at it, i’m going to pretend i’m Brad Pitt. Make believe is SO much fun. I’d suggest you all try it, but maybe you’re already there…

[John James Jacoby]

I’ve logged into both sides with a test account and still run into this problem. It seems that integrating with WordPress interferes with some capabilities. Like, when viewing a topic logged in as Key Master, I can see the IP addresses of people that post, and I have the link to add that topic to my favorites, but I cannot post a reply, I cannot edit the tags, and I cannot see any other admin functions; all of their capabilities return no value.

I haven’t given up yet! hah!

[John James Jacoby]

Screen readers and modified browsers might love lists, but they also love properly coded tables, of which most people really seem to do.

Google “everything you know about css is wrong” and check out how to style lists and div’s as tables, it’s an interesting read also. I don’t agree with it, but it is interesting.

The idea of a DIV is not to nest them, but to use them to DIVIDE content. The idea of a table is to compare data in a relational way. I think if you were going to use lists for forums, you would HAVE TO use DL’s and use dt’s for the headers at the very least, to provide a definition to the content being displayed.

I mean, I see how the argument goes both ways. (Off topic: If you’re really into accessibility, check out my WordPress section 508 theme at http://www.wp508.com? It’s not completely full of content yet, seems I have about 5 half finished projects right now ugh.)

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m not sure who has access to edit the information on this website (outwith the forums) but any change we could have :

<b>”Do NOT try to integrate WordPress 2.6 with bbPress 0.9 – only use WP 2.5.x – the reason for this is simple – WordPress has radically changed the way cookies are used. “</b>

oooh i dont know, maybe on the INTEGRATION TO WORDPRESS page?!?! or even on the download section.

How daft is it to hide it away in a forum when it’s quite essential information? If you download the latest stable wordpress and the latest stable BBpress – they’re uncompatable. that to me seems kind of important to new people who download stable releases of both to get started!

[John Doe]

Ok, it’s a slight fix since it’ll only solve one of the issues (I was having) with integration.

The problem was that I could not for the life of me force bbPress to set a ‘logged_in’ cookie with path ‘/’.

WordPress: domain.com

bbPress: domain.com/forum/

This meant once I’d logged in via bbPress, when I was browsing WordPress (although it set the ‘auth’ cookie fine and I could view wp-admin/) it ‘appeared’ that I was logged out (log in and register link, instead of log out and site admin).

I’d already tried this in bb-config.php, along with the other ‘integration speedups’ bbPress supplied;

$bb->sitecookiepath = '';

I’d also tried setting it to ‘/’ as well, but every time the cookie would not get set.

And here was the culprit; line 673 in bb-settings.php;

$bb->sitecookiepath = rtrim($bb->sitecookiepath, '/');

Then on line 735, it checks if $bb->;sitecookiepath is not set or empty. Otherwise, the ‘logged_in’ cookie for sitecookiepath will not get added to the $cookies array, and hence will not be set when wp_set_auth_cookie is called (specifically line 172, pluggable.php).

Changing the culprit to this fixed it for me;

$bb->sitecookiepath = '/' . trim($bb->sitecookiepath, '/');

The complete fix (for me) was to force all logins, registrations and logouts through bbPress with this in a .htaccess at the WordPress root;

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} action=register

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php forum/register.php [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} action=logout

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php forum/bb-login.php?logout=1 [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php$ forum/bb-login.php [R=301,NC]

This actually worked out better for me, since bbPress by nature allows you to skin the login, and users get to enter a little more info for their profile during registration.

Hope this of some help to others!

[kevinjohngallagher]

“But yes, yes, GOD yes, the documentation whomps. Then again, so did WordPresses back in the day “

Agreed.

But lets learn from those mistakes

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

There has to be some level of organization to a forum, I think we can agree, since without form you have chaos and a splat list of data. Of course, organizing in a way that ‘makes sense’ is in the eye of the beholder.

I can’t visualize something ‘less rigid’ than the current iteration of bbpress type forms, since tags gives you a rather light level of ‘org’. Yeah, you still need some categories, but I don’t see how this negates a hierarchy, except in the case that bbPress cats are fake and, thus, annoying to me. Thinking back on the other forum software I’ve used, though, it’s all been a bit similar. You have a forum and sub-forums under that. So… okay, if that annoys you then, yes, everyone sucks equally

But what’s ‘better’?

The only option that would meet the no-standard output is something like an XML file that you format how you want. Dunno how you’d sort out hierarchy though. You’d probably have to treat everything as equal (i.e. it’s all ‘posted’) with flags for cat, forum and post in the SQL table to sort out output. But … Yeah, I can’t see how to unstructure it more.

But yes, yes, GOD yes, the documentation whomps. Then again, so did WordPresses back in the day

[John James Jacoby]

Well, I think that a theme designer and a theme developer are two different positions now, and to develop means to program, while to design means to mock the lay-out and intent.

And I’m okay with that.

Also, I think that tables are the most logical way to present forum data without mucking up the content with div’s and span’s. The theme files allow you to code your table rows, heads, bodys, and footers, so you can set your own distinction between cols and rows for accessibility sake.

WordPress suffers from this similarly, with forcing h2’s and ul’s all over the place when they should probably be h3’s or dl’s considering, and the alternative is tricking it into serving what you want, versus just ordering off the menu.

(I must be hungry with all these food analogies.)

Really, I think that you’re right, and that bbPress would benefit from some kind of WordPress-esque codex, because otherwise I’m forced to decompile the included themes and fit them to my needs, which is a good way to learn, but a bad way to be efficient.

[John James Jacoby]

ck, how exactly would the .htaccess be most safely accomplished. I am thinking of doing this as I would like try and get the current_page class within WordPress to still work when in the forums also.

Curious if you’ve ran into this yet?

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi _CK_,

Firstly, sorry about the gender thing (I blame going from French to English – to simplify I make everything masculine).

I’ve used the categories in 1.0alpha CK, and they do work wonders in the back end.

You make a number of really good points here, really good ones so if it’s cool I’ll go through them one by one.

It’s not just that I don’t “immediately see the solution” (though I admit I don’t), but lets run with that for a bit There is no documentation, there is no list of tags I can use and their features (e.g. https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags) which starts to make a lot of template development guesswork. Are we honestly at the stage of saying that any theme designer or developer out there now needs to be a PHP guru and also know BBpress inside and out to be able to produce a non-liner theme?

If we are, maybe, just maybe that why we’ve found it so hard to get people to use BBpress; and maybe that’s why almost all of the themes out there look the exactly same.

Heck, even when I did manage to code a solution, I found that so much of the template is NOT in the actual editable template but in the damned /bb-includes/template-fucntions.php file that I was close to giving up. (this btw is another example of how NOT theme developer friendly BBpress is – there is NO documentation on how to overwrite these functions in a theme, and I’m somewhat confident that it’ll need a plugin – which also can’t be distributed in a theme).

I totally understand and am impressed with BB1.0alpha’s understanding of categories and forums in a parent/child hierarchy. The backend totally seems to grasp them – and in fact I’ve used the ‘forum is categories’ plug-in with 0.9 and it worked really well (congratulations and thanks whoever developed it).

But you’ve hit on the crux of the problem with “the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet”.

This is the ‘mindset’ I was talking about originally. You’re coding and what you’ve given this community is amazing and without reproach, so hopefully you won’t mind me using you as en example.

What we’re doing is effectively plastering over the crack. We’re fixing the… visible bit of the problem (does that make sense in English, it’s a bit like “tip of the iceberg” thing which makes no sense in french). Let me hark back to your impressive Unread Posts plug-in (which is wonderful). Rather than actually say ok this FORUM or TOPIC that we’re iterating though has unread posts, you coded a plug-in that ONLY worked it out when building the CSS of the actual forum name. It’s like, shooting the small fish downstream and then having to constantly go back upstream when someone points out that the bigger fishes are still there.

People want Parent/Child? Sure we’ll make the change in the DB and admin.

People want Categories? Sure we’ll give it to them in the DB and admin.

People want to make changes to the template? Sure we’ll only work out if its’ a parent/child in the CSS because no-one has specifically asked us via a letter from the queen to give it to them in the $GLOBAL[‘forum’] variable 2 lines above. I mean, we COULD work it out before hand, but why would we do that, because then people could do what they wanted with the theme and CSS – heck they wouldn’t be stuck to using tables in a linear fashion and… oh, no, wait…

It’s… fire fighting, it’s fixing the visible bit of the problem without actually tackling WHY people might have spotted the issue. It’s not a complaint, truly it’s not, the coding that’s been done is wonderful and I’m always impressed by it; but the mindset the thought process behind these features, isn’t wide enough.

You yourself can see how scarce this and bbshowcase forums are, it’s hardly a bustling thriving community. If we’re honestly waiting for someone to specifically come and ask for processing to be done at the earliest stage possible and not just at the CSS level then we may be waiting a long while.

I appreciate that it’s “Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like” for someone of your obvious expertise, but not everyone in the community could do that. And while I think I could make a decent stab at it, not everyone here could, and certainly not everyone who could design/develop a theme could. Not to mention that as a THEME we’d need to specify plugins that need to be installed at the same time. Surely the good developers here at BBpress can see that’s not how a THEME works in wordpress.

What we’re effectively doing is adding a double step. We’re saying that to be a theme developer, you need to be able to code PHP plugins and be able to read, sift, assume and work out all the relevant tags/functions/classes/object without any documentation. That’s a massive massive assumption. Which is what my original mindset point was – we’ve effectively built a piece of software that’s really good for us the “open source loving / developing / community” but not good for the average user/owner.

BBpress has so much potential, and whether people in the community think that my particular examples are valid or not (we are all entitled to our opinion), surely we can all agree on certain points:

Making BBpress website structure and look fit into a more wordpress.org format will help people stick around:

Increasing the documentation will make things a lot easier.

Not presuming that template developers are PHP wizards.

Making the structure of the core files match WordPress more.

I, like all of you, want BBpress to be better. But right now we’re going down one path, and the more we go down it, the harder it will be to allow people to take their BBpress forum in it’s own direction.

[lorenzocoffee]

Hi,

any news about integrating the incoming WP 2.7?

I just need (as most of you) to automatically post in BBpress the WP posts,and to made them commentable on there (BBpress).

thanks.

[John James Jacoby]

lol I gotchya…

I have been working with bbPress for 2 days now, so I can openly admit that my knowledge on the inner workings of it (and maybe its limitations) is limited to those 2 days of study.

From my experience with forum software, the category vs forum debate and struggle basically exists in a similar way, at least I know it does for phpBB. A category is just a forum without the ability to post directly to it, and I think that’s really the only way to do it without joining or adding an additional query that isn’t really necessary.

I think what it sounds like you’re asking for is something more official like what WordPress has in terms of development cycle, acknowledgment, and respect from its developers. I also think that because almost everything for bbPress is a plug-in, that the opportunity for those plug-ins not to play nice with one another is greater.

So, the dilemma is to package these as features within the forum, or allow the community to create those features when they are needed. The big guys bloat their forums with tons of stuff and allow the admin to turn them off, and bbPress does the opposite.

I’m not sure bbPress really has a development plan anymore other than tweaking and steamlining the code to work better with WordPress, and maybe eventually import/export posts from other forum software. I personally think that better user management would be nice, but that brings up how WordPress doesn’t really care about users at all. Ha!

[John James Jacoby]

Check this topic…

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/integrate-wp27-and-bbp10a2

Then, check it again for exactness…

Then, check it a third time…

It took me a little back-and forth, but I was able to make all of my logins and logouts work in every direction without any hacking of the core files or additional plug-ins.

[jenuwefa]

Hear, hear….

[johnhiler]

_ck_ just wrote a great plugin that does what you’re asking for, I believe:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/related-topics/

[_ck_]

Actually, the way categories are done in bbPress is in part done for backward plugin compatibility with 0.9 (which will likely be around quite awhile, at least a year, due to it’s performance over 1.0)

And the way it works is just fine too – just because you don’t immediately see the solution you want to breakdown the categories before or after the loop, doesn’t mean it’s not there. bbPress 1.0 truly does understand that a forum is a parent of another and if it’s a category holder for it – the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet. Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like, and using a single carefully crafted mysql query, you can literally walk the reverse chain of post->topic->forum->category.

If you want forums broken down into categories with say three categories and three tables, either write a plugin or do it in the template to build a new array of $forums[1], $forums[2] etc. But don’t change the original way bbPress works to return $forums as all the forums or it will break existing plugins.

These kinds of feature growing pains were also present in WordPress, I can assure you – I’ve been using WP since 1.5 and I really long for the good old days of 2.0-2.1. The problem is that big leaps tend to break big things, or make them overly complex. WordPress 2.7 is a perfect example of things going very, very wrong with care towards backward compatibility and massive feature bloat, even worse than the 2.3 cookies and tags changes.

bbPress 1.0 is getting more things right from the start than WordPress did – cookies, tags, object cache, are all the more advanced methods right off and will save some headaches for plugin developers down the road (not so much for us 0.9 plugin developers).

Everyone has a different view of what’s missing in bbPress – from my standpoint the two biggest problems are 1. search sucks (so does WordPress’s after half a decade still) and 2. the ability to move posts between topics really needs to be done in the core asap so plugins know how to deal with moving targets.

ps. it’s “her” plugins not “his”

pps. you should be impressed how easy it was to make the topic/forum row affected instead of the title in Unread Posts – I can’t think of any other software that would be so easy. Hidden Forums is another example of the power of bbPress’s filter design.