[Nate]

my forum is also inheriting some traits from the default theme, ignoring others, etc. basically a giant mess, as i’m using a custom theme & custom framework.

[Erlend]

[Multisite:] Users can access all forums, or users can only access forums for which they have a role on that specific site?

I think they should have access to all forums. Once you have a multisite setup, isn’t it commonly because a bunch of sites are going to have some unifying factor in common?

On my own site, all forum activity would most likely be confined to a single bbPress install tied to the main BuddyPress site, so I don’t think this decision concerns me anyhow. I would like to know though, would either way be fairly easy to opt into by means of existing settings or a plugin if whatever ends up as the default is not ideal for a particular setup?

Search is a pretty big topic. Isn’t this something that ought to be discussed in context of the entire WordPress ecosystem?, i.e. including at least Multisite and BuddyPress. I really think there ought to be just the one default type of WordPress search, which both bbPress and BuddyPress would plug into. My project will rely on bbPress in BuddyPress, so in my case I’m looking for a BuddyPress search that will properly incorporate bbPress search results.

As for the settings panel, I would agree that the secondary layer of navigational tabs that many premium themes (-frameworks) come with is very manageable.

[Chloe.Flanery]

Thanks. Honestly, im not even sure the 2010 theme is loading. It seems the forum is using my wp theme css rather than the default css. Ive tried copying the CSS from the bbp-twentyten into my themes style.css and still no luck. The forum is basically a blank slate right now.

[Doug Smith]

How do you think it should work? Should forum results appear in your existing blog search? Should they be separated? Should there be some kind of ‘smart search’ that knows where the request came from, and only shows results based on the type of content you are looking at (blog/forum/other)?

The desired mode of search could depend on the site or the page within the site. In my case, I would want to show both main site and forum content in a search from the main site because I want to expose that content. But within the forum pages I wouldn’t mind adding a checkbox to the search to limit it to forum content only.

How about choosing a sensible default to avoid options, but then giving the search function parameters to allow a theme developer to do the kinds of things I described?

@anointed mentioned grouping search results. I would want to be able to code a search results page with mixed content or grouped by posts, pages, forum posts, and other custom post types. But I realize that may beyond the scope of the decision you need to make for this.

I think our settings page is starting to get out of hand. Should we break the one page up into a few, or leave it as 1 page with all options?

Thanks for trying to stick to the “decisions over options” mantra. Opinionated software is much more pleasurable to use.

The settings page does have more options than any of the WordPress settings pages so it is a bit full. I could certainly see grouping all of the slug-related options to their own page. But it’s not so horrible now that it couldn’t go out the door and then be iterated later.

[master5o1]

To show the graphical smilies you must first allow graphical smilies in WordPress. Do that by going into Settings > Writing and ticking the “Convert emoticons like …”

That will allow standard WP smilies and show the smiley panel on the toolbar. The custom smileys is an option in the toolbar settings page.

I’ll look into where a relevant action hook is for the comments section as well as the id/name of the comment postbox. But I’ll really only be able to test this for the TwentyTen, TwentyEleven and BuddyPress default themes at this time.

[pimarts]

Final addition, I’m giving up on this for now:

I run a child theme of bp-default.

I have files for archive.php, comments.php, footer.php, functions.php, header.php, index.php, page.php, search.php, single.php and type.php in my theme dir. That’s it.

Everything seems to work aside from the editing of topics. I tried copying single-reply-edit.php and single-topic-edit.php to my theme dir, but that didn’t help either.

With this info, any ideas now? Like I said, I’m giving up. I pretty much tried anything I could think of by now. Sorry to bother you with this

[Anointed]

Which do you prefer as the default? Users can access all forums, or users can only access forums for which they have a role on that specific site?

I would prefer that users can only access a forum for which they have a role on a specific site.

Here is my argument for this:

1. It is easy enough to programmatically add a user to another site either upon registration or after the fact.

2. buddypress finally has ‘mu’ capability. Many of us have asked for years to have separated installs of bp with an ‘mu’ network. Having users added to all forums can confuse this operation. (besides if you are using buddypress, there is already a plugin to add all users to all groups/forums)

Should forum results appear in your existing blog search? Should they be separated?

I’d rather have all results show up in a users search in a single search box.

Here is my argument:

1. Forum posts are data just like a post is data. I simply use forums in order to present the data in a different layout than blogs as it can be more appropriate.

2. A user comes to a website to find information. Who am I to tell a user that the million+ posts in my forum are less relevant to what they are looking for than a blog post? It gives the impression to a user who uses search and does not see the forum results that there is less relevant information on the site than there actually is.

How I would solve the template problem.

1. Include all results in the search output and simply separate out the design within the template for each type of data output.

`if (get_query_var(‘post_type’) == “post”){

get_template_part( ‘loop’, ‘post’ );

} elseif (get_query_var(‘post_type’) == “topic”){

get_template_part( ‘loop’, ‘topic’ );

} else …..’

2. This can lead to one really annoying issue. The results are output in the order of ‘post-date’, so the results are jumbled together. Meaning you could end up with post – topic – topic – post – reply…

To solve this issue I would attack this with the ‘groupby’ function. I would show 10x ‘posts’ then 10x ‘topics’ then 10x ‘replies’ etc, with a ‘MORE’ button underneath each of the 10. That way a user could say I want to see ‘MORE’ search results for just ‘posts’, or just ‘topics’ etc..

To go even fancier, you could apply some ajax loading to the MORE button.

Another option would be to allow the user to filter their search results either pre or post search utilizing check boxes. A user could select what types they want to search for. Then have the search function itself only include the selected post-types in the initial query.

*All of this is currently possible and I am about 70% there already, although not for search specifically. I ran into this issue when a user goes to a tax term page where the tax term is shared by multiple post-types. When I finish, I’ll pass the code along, although I’m sure you can probably do better than I can anyway.

Should we break the one page up into a few, or leave it as 1 page with all options?

I had to laugh when I read that you thought the page was already out of control. Have you ever seen the admin page for vbulletin?

If it were me, I would use a multi-tabbed admin page much like many of the premium theme companies use.

I absolutely love the flexibility that the vbulletin admin panel gives me. I can control every aspect imaginable and can’t imagine running a large forum without it.

Frankly if an admin doesn’t want to take the time to learn and operate the admin panel they should just bugger off and install any one of the crappy basic forums already available. I’d rather see bbpress turn into a full blown commercial level forum setup for wp.

[pimarts]

Thanks for looking into it! Guess I’ll need to dig a bit deeper in this then. I don’t use any custom bbPress template files by the way. (I do run buddyPress and custom post types, maybe something strange is going on in there).

Guess I need to find out what page is being loaded / looked for when it re-directs from /edit/ to the topic.

Edit: Seems it’s loading /mytheme/page.php (a child-theme copy of bp-default/page.php), but the re-direction happens before loading that page…

Edit2: Disabling all plugins (aside from buddypress & bbpress) and the stuff in functions.php didn’t help either.

[Thomas Clausen]

Why not go the official way? https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/bbpress/plugin

Here it looks like the plugin is 100% translated in swedish

https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/bbpress/plugin/sv/default

[John James Jacoby]

So 2.0 beta has been downloaded over 15k times, which is awesome. Feedback has been coming in steadily, and I’ve been holding an official RC because of a few odds and ends that are taking some time to figure out. Hoping to get some feedback on a few specific things:

Page Templates

The way WordPress works, page templates can work automagically if the template name matches a page slug. This is really convenient as it automatically acts like a page template without setting it, but can get in the way if you want to use a specific page slug and not have bbPress take it over. Example:

page-user-register.php

If you made a WordPress page with the unique slug ‘user-register’ WordPress would automatically use that template file for that page. So far I’ve purposely picked unlikely template names so they wouldn’t collide with existing slugs. But, if that same file was renamed to:

page-register.php

…all it would take is making a “Register” page and bbPress would automatically have a sign-up page with no shortcodes and no more work. The adverse to that convenience is if you want to customize your sign-up page beyond what bbPress provides, you’re looking at a totally custom theme.

This works with any template file in the root folder of a theme, so there are lots of possibilities. My goal is to satisfy the majority, so I’m thinking of heading in this direction and renaming the template files.

Multisite

At the moment, multisite integration works great, if you want to have individual bbPress forums with their own authorized users per forum. If you want to have all users have access to all forums in a multisite install, you’re currently out of luck. With multisite there are endless configuration options, and I see the use case for all of them.

Which do you prefer as the default? Users can access all forums, or users can only access forums for which they have a role on that specific site?

Search

Right now there is no interface for searching the bbPress 2.0 integrated forums. The original implementation got negative reviews because search results were site wide, showing blog entries, topics, and replies.

It’s currently possible to filter search results by post type (topic/reply) but most WordPress themes assume the search results will come from posts or pages, and as such aren’t styled to look like forum results, which is really confusing to the person performing the search. It’s also confusing to have multiple search boxes, or to need to pick what results you’re looking for.

How do you think it should work? Should forum results appear in your existing blog search? Should they be separated? Should there be some kind of ‘smart search’ that knows where the request came from, and only shows results based on the type of content you are looking at (blog/forum/other)?

Settings

The WordPress mantra is decisions over options, but creating something as large as a discussion forum within WordPress is going to come with at least a few settings. I think our settings page is starting to get out of hand. Should we break the one page up into a few, or leave it as 1 page with all options?

That’s what’s on my mind. If you’ve been using 2.0 for the past few weeks, your input would be much appreciated so these last few ends can be tied up and we can let this ship sail.

[Jon Breitenbucher]

Also, is there an easy way from within a theme (say in functions.php or via style.css) to change the default size of gravatars in the topic reply dialog? I’m assuming it would require a function as bbPress is setting it via a function, from what I was able to glean peeking at the bbPress code. Thanks.

[master5o1]

I’m not sure. But it’s really just a collection of images, and a PHP array that binds a particular smiley code (e.g. ‘‘) to a specific image file, (e.g. ‘smile.png’).

So it’s really quite easy to piece together your own smiley package. I might be interested in hosting some on my website as a central and related place for distribution.

The array is practically an overwrite of the array that handles the WordPress’ default smilies.

PS. I’m about to update the plugin to allow this fallback to plugin’s smiley dir, among a few other things that I’ve thought of over the last hour.

[master5o1]

Hi. In the plugin directory I have included a folder named smilies. Copy this directory and its contents into the ./wp-content/ directory.

Essentially:

mv ./wp-content/plugins/bbpress-post-toolbar/smilies ./wp-content/ -r

If you want to change the smilies, take a look at the package-config.php file inside the smilies directory mentioned above and you can probably work out how to switch the files, or add more to the set.

—-

I think I’ll update my plugin so that instead of defaulting to WordPress’ smilies, it’ll defaults to the smilies folder in the plugin dir.

ie: Order of preference will become:

if option allows custom smilies:

./wp-content/smilies/

./wp-content/plugins/bbpress-post-toolbar/smilies/

else:

WordPress’ default set.

[Grahambo77]

I have a clean brand new install of WordPress.

I installed the buddypress plugin and it seems like it works fine. I don’t like the fact you can’t make any changes to it’s internal install of bbpress (no settings page that I could find) so I don’t enable the forum.

I install the bbPress Plugin (2.0-beta-3b) and it shows up in the dashboard. I can create forums and posts. I cannot get to the default listing of forums on the site.

mydomain.com/forums/ – goes to what looks like a blank wordpress page named “Forums”

I can click view forum from withing the dashboard and it takes me to the forum topic

[macmullet]

I converted from standalone BBPress to BBPress 2.0 as a plugin and made a page with the forum topics as my home page. None of the paging links at the top of the page work. Click any number and it only pulls back the first page.

http://jawsmovie.com/?paged=2

is the same as

http://jawsmovie.com/?paged=54

etc.

I tried changing permalinks and if I do anything other than the default setting, I get 404 errors.

Any ideas?

[funnycat777]

Hello,

Please let me know if there is a way to customize “bbpress login widget” (the default widget when you install bbpress 2.0 plugin) to redirect to current page when logging in? The current setup is that no matter what page you are in, you will be redirected to the front page.

[sithinquisitor]

Hi again

I have remedied a part of this by making a new page template for the page that shows bbpress.

http://www.sithinquisitors.com/sith-inquisitor-forums/

My problem now is that all other pages apart from the forum main page wont use the template page I have made and revert back to the three column default template of the site. Such as http://www.sithinquisitors.com/old-republic-forum/class-discussion/

Is there something that I am missing to get this to work? thanks!

[fleetadmiral]

I’m using Avatar Upload with the Misty Morning theme and that theme seems to work best with avatars not much bigger than 50×50 pixels.

Trouble is, the user data I have imported from an old bbPress install seems to have existing users’ avatar sizes embedded somewhere – so that even the default avatar is coming up for existing users as 100×100 as it was on the old site. New users seem to be OK and working as Avatar Upload intended.

Is there anywhere in the database I can find this old avatar data and any way I can delete/change it?

[Nate]

@John

Thanks for responding. I thought I followed every step. Let me clarify since I messed up my earlier clarification.

I initially copied the default theme put it in the same plugin directory and renamed it to bbp-empt. I included the function code in my main theme “Cost” directory function.php file. After some fooling around I realized nothing was working so I came here and followed every step in this thread instead of half-assin it like it did before.

I would prefer not to use a child theme since I’m the Author of the “Cost” named theme I’m using. I guess I don’t quite understand how I get bbpress to use bbp-empt when it’s sitting in my Cost directory. Is there a instruction manual that describes that process?

Or is it a simple function name change or is there a place in the WP admin area I missed which allows you to chose the which template bbpress uses?

[Erlend]

I’ve grown to really like the theme used in these forums. Is it one of the defaults that comes with v2.0?

Nope, afraid not. This theme was custom made for the bbpress.org website, and furthermore it’s made for bbPress 1.0, not the bbPress 2.0 plugin, which I believe handles theming somewhat differently.

Maybe whoever made the theme will be willing to look into it seeing as the new bbPress is going stable any day now.

[Erlend]

I’ve grown to really like the theme used in these forums. Is it one of the defaults that comes with v2.0?

Nope, afraid not. This theme was custom made for the bbpress.org website, and furthermore it’s made for bbPress 1.0, not the bbPress 2.0 plugin, which I believe handles theming somewhat differently.

Maybe whoever made the theme will be willing to look into it seeing as the new bbPress is going stable any day now.

[darthjones2]

I’ve grown to really like the theme used in these forums. Is it one of the defaults that comes with v2.0?

[darthjones2]

I’ve grown to really like the theme used in these forums. Is it one of the defaults that comes with v2.0?

[Nate]

I’m new to this plugin and to bbpress in general though I do work with WordPress on a regular basis. The forums load fine. I would like to copy the default theme and customize my own based on the original.

The problem is, I don’t see a place where I can choose a template for BBPress to use. Is there a place in the WP admin panel I’m overlooking or do I need a custom function to load a specific theme?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Erlend]

It strikes me as a really useful feature to have for forums, yet it doesn’t seem to be included by default for the forum post type. Is there any particular reason for this?