[John Blackbourn]

I thought I would show off my first completed bbPress project:

dinetoread.ie

dinetoread.ie/forums

(Note: currently the forum login integration is actually broken (see this thread) due to my hastiness to upgrade WordPress to 2.8 without finishing checking everything first.)

User registration and logging in/out is all handled through bbPress. Integration worked perfectly first time when following the invaluable basic integration screencast by sambauers.

Customisations include:

• A bbPress theme written from the ground up, to match the rest of the site.
• Extended user profiles showing “Currently reading” and favourite books (example of a full profile).
• Private profile fields for private information needed when signing up for events.
• Additional meta information on topics to optionally display the book being discussed (example on this topic).
• Reverse thread ordering option, to allow visitors and users to reverse the order of posts in a thread (persistent).
• Custom avatar uploading functionality (defaults to Gravatar).
• Basic but surprisingly effective protection against spam user registrations in the form of blocking any registration which includes a value in the URL profile field (this field is not used on the site nor shown on the registration form). It works on the premise that any registration submission that includes a value in the URL field must be an automated spam bot registration and can simply be blocked.
• A second level of spam registration protection using the StopForumSpam.com API.

All the customisations have been achieved through custom plugins, the core hasn’t been touched. All the book images and links are automatically pulled in from the Amazon Web Services API.

I’m planning on releasing a couple of the plugins I wrote for the site once I’ve tidied them up and added some comments. I’ll probably wait until bbPress 1.0 though.

Any feedback appreciated!

[Sam Bauers]

@dthom

The version is in a meta tag in the header as well as stated in the footer of the admin area.

bbPress doesn’t have granular per-forum permissions out-of-the-box. There are plugins that cover that though.

You might need to use the smtp mailer plugin to get emails working. Using that you can send email via an SMTP server instead of the default method which tries to send through PHP’s mail() function.

@the_Wish

The “fix” won’t fix any text which is already malformed. Once you edit the text to repair it shouldn’t happen again.

@Michael3185

0.9 Templates should still work with 1.0 – you will want to examine some of the new template functions that are in the default theme though.

[michael3185]

Something I don’t see mentioned yet (unless I’ve missed it) is what will happen to custom themes if I upgrade to RC2? By which I mean, have the files been changed in the default template? Will I have to re-write them, or will my custom theme from 0.9.0.5 work fine?

I’d like to test out RC2 on a non-live forum, but don’t want to spend ages modifying template files all over again.

[massbase]

yeahs.

the whole thing is based off the kakumei default theme, so everything should be very familiar for you too edit.

[Sam Bauers]

bbPress uses the display name by default for most functions where the user needs to be identified by name. Check how the default template does it.

The only time the user login is shown is if the user has no display name set.

[Florian]

I am searching for a way to show the author with his or full name instead of the username.

Is there a way to hack the template to do that? Or a plugin?

Alternatively, is there a way to make the full name the default setting for all users?

I already tried using the Use Display Name plugin, but it had no effect. Probably because it was written for an older version.

I’m using bbPress 1.0 RC2 integrated (not deep) with WPMU 2.7.1 and Buddypress.

[inntell]

Help! I’m using bbPress 1.0 rc-2. I’ve completed the installation process. But after I’ve tried the first log in to changed my password I could not go back to dashboard. It has an error message like this.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function bb_is_search() in /home/xxxxxxx/public_html/xxxxx/bb-includes/defaults.bb-filters.php on line 70

I’ve just downloaded bbpress 1.0 rc-2 today.

[Ohna]

Hi all,

In “bbPress 9.0.5” I used a custom function to display author avatar outside the topic.php, I try the same function on bbPress 1.0 rc 2 and no longer works, can you help me?

Custom function:

function topic_author_avatar( $size = '50', $default = '', $post_id = 0 ) {

if ( ! bb_get_option('avatars_show') )

return false;



$author_id = get_topic_author();

if ( $link = get_user_link( $author_id ) ) {

echo '<a href="' . attribute_escape( $link ) . '">' . bb_get_avatar( $author_id, $size, $default ) . '</a>';

} else {

echo bb_get_avatar( $author_id, $size, $default );

}

}

[timskii]

Ipstenu, there is further information here. In my case, there are serious errors when tagging using default everything, with no plugins. However the issue seems to relate to tags which existed prior to an upgrade from 0.9, so perhaps does not affect a fresh install?

[Arturo]

i’ve the same problem in admin area i’ve the same problem, i’ve tried to change the template with the default kakumei…

deleted the custom theme and the problem persists.

[bradsucks]

I’m looking to add a field to the bbPress sign-up process, so that it’ll be added to bb_usermeta like the default Website/Occupation/Location ones. Does anyone know of any plugins that already do this?

I think I could hack it up but I’d rather learn from a plugin that’s doing it properly. Thanks!

[daniellaf]

Hi Everyone!

Just got a WordPress and BBPress integrated site working. I adapted the default theme to make it match our custom WordPress theme. Comments appreciated!

Site: http://www.planningpool.com

Forum: http://www.planningpool.com/forum

[timskii]

Below is the code I wrote for “SEO”-related tweaks. It tries to fill the description meta with something relevant, and adds keywords based on a combination of tags and site-wide words (added via the admin screen). It’s still rough round the edges. For example, it will produce duplicate descriptions on multi-page topics, and descriptions may not be terribly different from the title tag.

<?php

/*

Plugin Name: SEO Tweaks

Description: Adds description and keywords meta to the header.

Author: Tim Howgego

Author URI: http://timhowgego.com/

Version: 0.1.rc

*/



add_action('bb_admin_menu_generator', 'seo_config_menu');

add_action('bb_admin-header.php', 'seo_config_process');



add_action('bb_head', 'seo_meta_description');

add_action('bb_head', 'seo_meta_keywords');



function seo_meta_description() {



switch ( bb_get_location() ) {



case 'topic-page':

$description = get_topic_title()." - ".bb_get_option( 'description' );

break;



case 'forum-page':

$description = get_forum_description();

break;



case 'tag-page':

if ( is_bb_tag() ) {

$description = __('Topics tagged')." ".bb_get_tag_name();

} else {

$description = __('List of tagged topics.');

}

break;



case 'profile-page':

$description = __('Profile for')." ".get_user_display_name()." - ".__('includes contact information and posting history.');

break;



case 'view-page':

$description = get_view_name()." - ".bb_get_option( 'description' );

break;



default:

$description = bb_get_option( 'description' );

break;

}



echo '<meta name="description" content="'.attribute_escape( $description ).'" />'."n";



}



function seo_meta_keywords() {



// Includes enhancements by _ck_



global $tags;

$keywords = array();



if ( !empty( $tags ) ) {

foreach ( $tags as $t ) {

$keywords[] = $t->raw_tag;

}

}



$default_keywords = bb_get_option( 'seo_keywords' );



if ( count( $default_keywords ) >0 ) {

$keywords[] = $default_keywords;

}



if ( count( $keywords ) >0 ) {

echo '<meta name="keywords" content="'.attribute_escape( implode( ", ", $keywords ) ).'" />'."n";

}

}



function seo_config_menu() {

bb_admin_add_submenu(__('SEO'), 'manage_plugins', 'seo_config_page');

}



function seo_config_page() {



?>

<h2><?php _e('SEO Tweaks Configuration'); ?></h2>



<form class="options" method="post" action="">



<fieldset>

<p><strong><label for="seo_keywords"><?php _e('Default keywords') ?></label></strong> (<?php _e('these words will be attached to every page, so only use words that describe the forum's overall content'); ?>):</p>

<textarea name="seo_keywords" id="seo_keywords" cols="100" rows="4"><?php bb_form_option( 'seo_keywords' ); ?></textarea>

<p><?php _e('Separate keywords with a comma. No formatting.'); ?></p>

</fieldset>



<fieldset>

<?php bb_nonce_field( 'seo_config' ); ?>

<input type="hidden" name="action" id="action" value="update_seo_config" />

<input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="<?php _e('Save Changes &raquo;') ?>" />

</fieldset>



</form>

<?php



}



function seo_config_process() {



if ($_POST['action'] == 'update_seo_config') {



bb_check_admin_referer( 'seo_config' );



if ($_POST['seo_keywords']) {

$value = htmlentities( trim( $_POST['seo_keywords'] ) , ENT_NOQUOTES );

if ($value) {

bb_update_option( 'seo_keywords', $value );

} else {

bb_delete_option( 'seo_keywords' );

}

} else {

bb_delete_option( 'seo_keywords' );

}



$goback = add_query_arg( 'seo_updated', 'true', wp_get_referer() );

bb_safe_redirect( $goback );

exit;

}



if ($_GET['seo_updated']) {

bb_admin_notice( __('Changes saved.') );

}



}



?>

[timskii]

The memcached information is useful to know. And based on what I’ve found below, will logically make an absolutely huge difference. Closer to “requires memcached” on a busy forum.

You see, I’ve done some more tests. And BBPress seems to do a lot of simple queries to check information that generally doesn’t change.

I’ve hooked up _ck_’s excellent BB-Benchmark, and started looking for patterns. I assume this picks up everything in 1.0.

As a general rule, page rendering (after queries) is very slightly slower with 1.0. That can probably be explained simply by twice the volume (in bytes) of files typically being executed from 0.9.4 to 1.0. Only about 10ms difference. So, not an issue.

The crux of the problem is the volume of queries. The fastest query execution is 1ms – measured, it seems, to within 0.1ms – although I’m unsure of that accuracy. This may be due to the way the database is hosted – mySQL is on a separate machine, which is logically going to impose a delay in getting results back.

1.0’s slowest query is faster than 0.9.4. But 1.0 executes vastly more queries: It’s almost inevitable that 40 queries will takes longer to execute than 10 queries, because there is such a significant overhead associated with “running a query”, regardless of its complexity.

Here are examples of what I found:

On the front page, forum views, and tag views, many pairs of queries are being run that look like:

SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE ID = ‘n’

SELECT meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_usermeta WHERE user_id = ‘n’ /* WP_Users::append_meta */

My first thought was that my templates or plugins were broken. But disabling everything, and switching to the default theme, still causes all these pairs of queries to be executed.

The only reason I can see for the first query is to extract the display name for each of the last post authors. I can’t see any requirement for the second query, unless you were trying to augment the name with some extra information, like a title.

The topic table contains a last poster field, but it cannot contain the display name, presumably because the display name can be changed on a whim, while the old username was unchanging. If you have a lot of active posters (rather than a handful), a 20-post-per-page view could easily require 40 individual queries, just to check a piece of information that probably has not changed.

Now, we can argue that there should be some element of caching of the display name in the topics table. I wouldn’t have a problem with, for example, always seeing the name the user displayed when they posted, rather than the name they are currently using. But there’s also a compromise position, where the last poster name is only checked against wp_users at intervals.

Profile views repeat this a lot:

SELECT meta_key, meta_value FROM bb_meta WHERE object_type = ‘bb_post’ AND object_id = n /* bb_append_meta */

And I’m only displaying recent replies.

Turning to a topic page. I’ve looked at the first 20 posts in a 260+ post-long topic. A real mix of users, some who have added a lot of custom data (I allow quite a lot to be added, which is stored in wp_usermeta). This is painful: 30ms total query time on 0.9.4, 120ms on 1.0. 14 queries plays 79 queries.

Again, the key weakness is duplication of ostensibly similar queries. Line after line of:

SELECT meta_key, meta_value FROM bb_meta WHERE object_type = ‘bb_post’ AND object_id = n /* bb_append_meta */

or

SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE ID = ‘n’

or

SELECT post_id FROM bb_posts WHERE topic_id = n AND post_status = 0 ORDER BY post_id ASC LIMIT 1

In contrast, 0.9.4 manages to decide all the IDs it needs, throws them all into one query, and presumably lets the PHP split out the results. The wp_usermeta data continues to be pulled out in such a manner:

SELECT user_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_usermeta WHERE user_id IN (n,n,n,n…) /* WP_Users::append_meta */

In 3ms. Bargain.

Keep in mind, you won’t see this pattern if your forum contains 20 posts by you. You must have the variety of posters, that tends to only be found on larger forums.

My gut feeling is that some of the loops aren’t terribly well optimized. Or not well optimized for remote databases. Or not well optimized for operation without a secondary cache. Something’s instinctively not right.

[raphaelb]

Using bbPress 0.9 and WordPress 2.7 — when a user tries to perform a password recovery, it’ll accept anything. It doesn’t give an error message if the username doesn’t exist.

Case study (this actually happened):

A user “forgot” his password, but it turned out he had actually never registered. So he goes to the password recovery page, enters a username that doesn’t exist, and is then greeted with the default reset password text, saying “An email has been sent to the address we have on file for you.” That text made him expect an email which never came.

A. Is this something that can be fixed? B. Is this something that should be filed as a bug?

[michael3185]

Apologies! I just re-uploaded it after you downloaded it, so grab it again. I added a needed plugin to the bbVanilla.zip file, which you should FTP to your my-plugins folder (no need to activate it). That provides a consistent warning/error page for various things.

Also, if you really want the Latest Topics at the top of the front page (a mess in my group’s eyes) then I can show you how add back it easily, or do it for you.

Just noticed on your site (looking sxc by the way); there’s a gap in front of .com in the title (intentional?), and you’ve left the default ‘Just another bbPress community’ message in the banner (Admin, Settings to change).

[michael3185]

The URL (for one that’s not active yet) is http://letsdoo.org I’ve just switch Bad Behaviour back on, and IE7 is just sitting there ticking away. Chrome still loads it fine though. I haven’t had anything like this before, and am on Vista Home Premium with the default firewall active.

[woodlandstar]

The complexity of discussion boards simply exceeds my patience level for user “Unfriendly” software. I have played with a few of them (phpBB, SMF,bbpress) and have concluded that they are just to damn difficult to integrate into a web site. Most will install easy enough, and the default themes are about as ugly as you can get. Every one of them claims to have easy configuration etc. What a pile of crap. The worst of the lot is the BBpress board. Which is surprising since their blog is so easy to install and changing themes is a snap.

The “how to” support pages for all of them must have been developed by computer geeks who rarely speak English. Instructions which should be simple are garbled and about as user friendly as a wet cat.

My intention was to attempt to integrate a discussion board with my blog (http://woodlandstar.net/WSblog/): something Word Press should have developed a long time ago. How difficult can it be to extend Comments into a simple discussion board? Until something is developed that easily installs and easily integrates with the existing web site, I will hold off on using BB.

[RWB]

I dleted the tables. I deleted the user files for bbpress.

This is the error message I get now.

The database failed to install. You may need to replace bbPress with a fresh copy and start again.

SQL ERROR!

>>> Database: lilienbr_wpmu (localhost)

>>>>>> CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS bb_forums (

forum_id int(10) NOT NULL auto_increment,

forum_name varchar(150) NOT NULL default ”,

forum_slug varchar(255) NOT NULL default ”,

forum_desc text NOT NULL,

forum_parent int(10) NOT NULL default 0,

forum_order int(10) NOT NULL default 0,

topics bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

posts bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

PRIMARY KEY (forum_id),

KEY forum_slug (forum_slug)

) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET ‘utf8’ COLLATE ‘uft8_general_ci’;

>>>>>> Unknown collation: ‘uft8_general_ci’

SQL ERROR!

>>> Database: lilienbr_wpmu (localhost)

>>>>>> CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS bb_meta (

meta_id bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,

object_type varchar(16) NOT NULL default ‘bb_option’,

object_id bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

meta_key varchar(255) default NULL,

meta_value longtext,

PRIMARY KEY (meta_id),

KEY object_type__meta_key (object_type, meta_key),

KEY object_type__object_id__meta_key (object_type, object_id, meta_key)

) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET ‘utf8’ COLLATE ‘uft8_general_ci’;

>>>>>> Unknown collation: ‘uft8_general_ci’

SQL ERROR!

>>> Database: lilienbr_wpmu (localhost)

>>>>>> CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS bb_posts (

post_id bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,

forum_id int(10) NOT NULL default 1,

topic_id bigint(20) NOT NULL default 1,

poster_id int(10) NOT NULL default 0,

post_text text NOT NULL,

post_time datetime NOT NULL default ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’,

poster_ip varchar(15) NOT NULL default ”,

post_status tinyint(1) NOT NULL default 0,

post_position bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

PRIMARY KEY (post_id),

KEY topic_time (topic_id, post_time),

KEY poster_time (poster_id, post_time),

KEY post_time (post_time),

FULLTEXT KEY post_text (post_text)

) TYPE = MYISAM DEFAULT CHARACTER SET ‘utf8’ COLLATE ‘uft8_general_ci’;

>>>>>> Unknown collation: ‘uft8_general_ci’

SQL ERROR!

>>> Database: lilienbr_wpmu (localhost)

>>>>>> CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS bb_terms (

term_id bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,

name varchar(55) NOT NULL default ”,

slug varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”,

term_group bigint(10) NOT NULL default 0,

PRIMARY KEY (term_id),

UNIQUE KEY slug (slug),

KEY name (name)

) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET ‘utf8’ COLLATE ‘uft8_general_ci’;

>>>>>> Unknown collation: ‘uft8_general_ci’

SQL ERROR!

>>> Database: lilienbr_wpmu (localhost)

>>>>>> CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS bb_term_relationships (

object_id bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

term_taxonomy_id bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

user_id bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

term_order int(11) NOT NULL default 0,

PRIMARY KEY (object_id, term_taxonomy_id),

KEY term_taxonomy_id (term_taxonomy_id)

) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET ‘utf8’ COLLATE ‘uft8_general_ci’;

>>>>>> Unknown collation: ‘uft8_general_ci’

SQL ERROR!

>>> Database: lilienbr_wpmu (localhost)

>>>>>> CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS bb_term_taxonomy (

term_taxonomy_id bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,

term_id bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

taxonomy varchar(32) NOT NULL default ”,

description longtext NOT NULL,

parent bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

count bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

PRIMARY KEY (term_taxonomy_id),

UNIQUE KEY term_id_taxonomy (term_id, taxonomy),

KEY taxonomy (taxonomy)

) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET ‘utf8’ COLLATE ‘uft8_general_ci’;

>>>>>> Unknown collation: ‘uft8_general_ci’

SQL ERROR!

>>> Database: lilienbr_wpmu (localhost)

>>>>>> CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS bb_topics (

topic_id bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,

topic_title varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,

topic_slug varchar(255) NOT NULL default ”,

topic_poster bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

topic_poster_name varchar(40) NOT NULL default ‘Anonymous’,

topic_last_poster bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

topic_last_poster_name varchar(40) NOT NULL default ”,

topic_start_time datetime NOT NULL default ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’,

topic_time datetime NOT NULL default ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’,

forum_id int(10) NOT NULL default 1,

topic_status tinyint(1) NOT NULL default 0,

topic_open tinyint(1) NOT NULL default 1,

topic_last_post_id bigint(20) NOT NULL default 1,

topic_sticky tinyint(1) NOT NULL default 0,

topic_posts bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

tag_count bigint(20) NOT NULL default 0,

PRIMARY KEY (topic_id),

KEY topic_slug (topic_slug),

KEY forum_time (forum_id, topic_time),

KEY user_start_time (topic_poster, topic_start_time),

KEY stickies (topic_status, topic_sticky, topic_time)

) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET ‘utf8’ COLLATE ‘uft8_general_ci’;

>>>>>> Unknown collation: ‘uft8_general_ci’

Database installation failed!!!

Is bbpress compatible with wordpress or am I wasting my time?

[michael3185]

Ahem. Spoke too soon. I tested my forum in Firefox and IE7 after working in Chrome, my default browser. I got an error page in IE7 from Bad Behaviour;

Error 403

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server.

You do not have permission to access this server.

Your technical support key is: (blah blah).

You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.

If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact badbots at ioerror.us and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.

On the ‘fix it yourself’ page there are no useful details of how to, and the email I sent got returned as failed.

Any ideas?

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

You mean to pull from you bbPress database to populate the members of your mailman list?

In theory, anything that worked for WordPress to do that could be tweaked for bbPress. Just be careful that the default is to leave people NOT getting emails, so they can opt-in if they want. Otherwise you’re practically spamming

[thekmen]

chrishajer – not sure what you are getting at?

I have been through that & many other searches and still don’t see a solution. Is there a specific one there I should be looking at?

This issue happens on a default install on 2 domains with no modifications made.

[michael3185]

I tested Vanilla out for a week or so, then bbPress (I’d tried every other flavour out there in the two weeks before). Vanilla is cool, and I love the look of version 2, but bbPress is what I’m going with now for 2 community forums.

As to speed, I haven’t done any ‘proper’ testing, but find bbPress very fast. Also, all the plugins I need worked first time without problems,and the default theme is very easy to adapt. bbPress only uses 8 core tables compared to 14 in Vanilla. I guess that might speed things up a little, as there are less eggs in the air..?

[Derek Herman]

// Custom Topic Starter Avatars

function topic_author_avatar( $size = '48', $default = '', $post_id = 0 ) {

if ( ! bb_get_option('avatars_show') )

return false;



$author_id = get_topic_author();

if ( $link = get_user_link( $author_id ) ) {

echo '<a href="' . attribute_escape( $link ) . '">' . bb_get_avatar( $author_id, $size, $default ) . '</a>';

} else {

echo bb_get_avatar( $author_id, $size, $default );

}

}

[tribsel]

Not sure if this belongs into this thread as it looks like its not a bug, but “feature”. At least in bbpress 0.9.0.4.

I dont think this is the way it should work.

You are adding new topic – and forget to enter something – eg topic title. Then press submit. Error message gets displayed with link to go back to forums. but there are two problems in this:

1. your custom template is suddenly not used (very confusing for users).

2. there is a link “Back to <your forum frontpage>” – this should point back to previous page not homepage! And fields you entered before should be “pre-filled” by your previous input. not cleared.

this default behaviour is pretty annoying for regular users, in my opinion.