[_ck_]

Another performance tweak that will help with the end user’s page loading times (but won’t reduce that queries - time report for the page generation) is to remove the shedload of external javascripts that bbPress tries to load on many pages. Note that doing this will remove the ajax features but bbPress falls back to the conventional page-reload method instead so that’s okay.

Only admin can use most of the ajax features anyway so this is crazy that bbPress adds half a dozen scripts for everyone, including the bloated 100k jquery library.

This technique requires a mini-plugin unfortunately:

<?php

/*

Plugin Name: bb-tweaks

*/

// get rid of default forum scripts

remove_action('bb_head', 'bb_print_scripts');

?>

(I’ve never tried it but it might be possible to just put the single line

remove_action('bb_head', 'bb_print_scripts');

inside functions.php in the theme folder.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hey JJJ,

its my understanding that all functions, including those that have the template hardcoded into it, require a plug-in to overwrite.

This sadly cant be kept in the template folder, nor turned on as default.

[kgosser]

Hey all,

So I’ve been checking out various forums to use for my business’ site, and I’ve got it paired down to bbPress and Vanilla. I’m leaning towards bbPress, but I have a few questions that I’m seeking answers to first. If anyone can help me out, it would be greatly appreciated!

(1) Is it available either by default or a plug-in to allow users to post <embed> or <object> snippets to show Flash files?

(2) Is there a plug-in available to allow image uploading to our server, or are all the ways to get an image to display within a thread by bb [img]code or the “Allow Images” plug-in?

(3) Would you consider bbPress’ theme customization to be about as equal (or easier) than WordPress’?

(4) Are there plug-ins to allow for either digg-style voting or normal 5-star voting? Being able to host community-driven contests is important for this project.

Thanks a lot in advance. One of the reasons I always use WordPress for my projects is because the community is one of the best on the Web, so I hope it rubs off a little bit for bbPress! Thanks again!

[chaslie]

OK – now I gotcha:

If using the default (kakumei) theme, lo0k for this code which is about line 43:

<?php if ( bb_forums() ) : ?>

REPLACE it with this code:

<?php if ( bb_forums(“depth=1”) ) : ?>

Works beatifuuly as described.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Avatars – They are in there by default, as Gravatars, they’re just turned off.

As for BBcode … Eh. Given that this is a spin off of WordPress and WP uses HTML and not BB code, I see why they chose not to.

[cocotrp]

I have a similar situation where forum members have asked to have an option as to which way the posts are sorted. If reversed, my recommendation would be to keep the initial post as the first in the sequence, followed by the most recent posts (in reverse order). Again, I’ve been looking for a plug-in that will provide this as an option, not a default.

Thanks in advance!

[wiseacre]

Hi! I have problems with bbpress and PHP 5.

On my hosting PHP 4 is “by default”. I am using .htaccess with

AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php

in my top directory.

With this .htaccess file bbpress does not working at all – I can’t install it and can’t use it after install.

Installation process is “windows like” – I

1 delete .htaccess

2 create manually bb-config.php

3 open the start page blog.example.com

4 click “Next” and fill just minimum set of fields. I don’t integrate bbpress with my blog

5 Everything is fine.

Without my .htaccess file bbpres works after install. After upload .htaccess – don’t. I cant open anything, can’t login and don’t have any access. The error message is the same “500 Internal Server Error”.

I don’t use permalinks or any plugins. Just default state …

I reported this here: http://trac.bbpress.org/ticket/1001

[John James Jacoby]

Short term, I was able to make this work by modifying 1 core WordPress file. This only allows for integration of the theme, but still does not allow access to the bbPress admin panel without changing the bb-config.php file back to original.

It’s essentially a quick fix to get the theme working with all capabilities playing nicely.

Basically I’m hard-coding the capability check from bbPress into WordPress. There should be a filter for this, but I’m not sure how to hook into it correctly without a mod or plug-in on the WordPress side.

~My fix is in no way a permanent solution. Auto-updating your WordPress installation will overwrite this fix.~

---

In FILE wp-includes/capabilities.php:

In the meta_map_cap function:

Around Line 906:

AFTER break;

BEFORE default

INSERT:

/*

*/

case 'write_post':

$caps[] = 'write_posts';

break;

case 'edit_post':

// edit_posts, edit_others_posts, edit_deleted, edit_closed, ignore_edit_lock

if ( !$bb_post = bb_get_post( $args[0] ) ) {

$caps[] = 'magically_provide_data_given_bad_input';

return $caps;

}

if ( $user_id == $bb_post->poster_id )

$caps[] = 'edit_posts';

else

$caps[] = 'edit_others_posts';

if ( $bb_post->post_status == '1' )

$caps[] = 'edit_deleted';

if ( !topic_is_open( $bb_post->topic_id ) )

$caps[] = 'edit_closed';

$post_time = bb_gmtstrtotime( $bb_post->post_time );

$curr_time = time() + 1;

$edit_lock = bb_get_option( 'edit_lock' );

if ( $edit_lock >= 0 && $curr_time - $post_time > $edit_lock * 60 )

$caps[] = 'ignore_edit_lock';

break;

case 'delete_post' :

// edit_deleted, delete_posts

if ( !$bb_post = bb_get_post( $args[0] ) ) {

$caps[] = 'magically_provide_data_given_bad_input';

return $caps;

}

if ( 0 != $bb_post->post_status )

$caps[] = 'edit_deleted';

// NO BREAK

case 'manage_posts' : // back compat

$caps[] = 'delete_posts';

break;

case 'write_topic':

$caps[] = 'write_topics';

break;

case 'edit_topic':

// edit_closed, edit_deleted, edit_topics, edit_others_topics

if ( !$topic = get_topic( $args[0] ) ) {

$caps[] = 'magically_provide_data_given_bad_input';

return $caps;

}

if ( !topic_is_open( $args[0]) )

$caps[] = 'edit_closed';

if ( '1' == $topic->topic_status )

$caps[] = 'edit_deleted';

if ( $user_id == $topic->topic_poster )

$caps[] = 'edit_topics';

else

$caps[] = 'edit_others_topics';

break;

case 'move_topic' :

$caps[] = 'move_topics';

break;

case 'stick_topic' :

$caps[] = 'stick_topics';

break;

case 'close_topic' :

$caps[] = 'close_topics';

break;

case 'delete_topic' :

$caps[] = 'delete_topics';

add_filter( 'get_topic_where', 'no_where', 9999 );

if ( !$topic = get_topic( $args[0] ) ) {

$caps[] = 'magically_provide_data_given_bad_input';

return $caps;

}

if ( 0 != $topic->topic_status )

$caps[] = 'edit_deleted';

remove_filter( 'get_topic_where', 'no_where', 9999 );

break;

case 'manage_topics' :

// back compat

$caps[] = 'move_topics';

$caps[] = 'stick_topics';

$caps[] = 'close_topics';

$caps[] = 'delete_topics';

break;

case 'add_tag_to':

// edit_closed, edit_deleted, edit_tags;

if ( !$topic = get_topic( $args[0] ) ) {

$caps[] = 'magically_provide_data_given_bad_input';

return $caps;

}

if ( !topic_is_open( $topic->topic_id ) )

$caps[] = 'edit_closed';

if ( '1' == $topic->topic_status )

$caps[] = 'edit_deleted';

$caps[] = 'edit_tags';

break;

case 'edit_tag_by_on':

// edit_closed, edit_deleted, edit_tags, edit_others_tags

if ( !$topic = get_topic( $args[1] ) ) {

$caps[] = 'magically_provide_data_given_bad_input';

return $caps;

}

if ( !topic_is_open( $topic->topic_id ) )

$caps[] = 'edit_closed';

if ( '1' == $topic->topic_status )

$caps[] = 'edit_deleted';

if ( $user_id == $args[0] )

$caps[] = 'edit_tags';

else

$caps[] = 'edit_others_tags';

break;

case 'edit_user':

// edit_profile, edit_users;

if ( $user_id == $args[0] )

$caps[] = 'edit_profile';

else

$caps[] = 'edit_users';

break;

case 'edit_favorites_of':

// edit_favorites, edit_others_favorites;

if ( $user_id == $args[0] )

$caps[] = 'edit_favorites';

else

$caps[] = 'edit_others_favorites';

break;

case 'delete_forum':

$caps[] = 'delete_forums';

break;

case 'change_user_password':

// change_password, edit_users

$caps[] = 'change_password';

if ( $user_id != $args[0] )

$caps[] = 'edit_users';

break;

/*

*/

[chrishajer]

In defense of bbPress, I think they went without search for a long time intentionally. It was not even included in the stock template until recently. The intention was that you could use tags to find specific content, click a member’s name to get all the replies they made and topics they started, etc.

For topics with no replies, there is a default view for that (look at the home page of this forum, near the bottom, to see it.) For other views, you probably want the My Views plugin by _ck_.

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/my-views/

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/

(look at the bottom right for all the views)

[chrishajer]

If your server supports mod_rewrite and .htaccess, you can make pretty permalinks work (if they work for WordPress, they can work for bbPress). You just need to follow the instructions.

And if bbPress is in a sub-directory of WordPress (collectibles-talk), then you will have two .htaccess files, or possibly all the rules in the WordPress-level .htaccess. The .htaccess you posted is the default WordPress one. You need more rules for bbPress.

Here is something about that:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/pretty-permalinks-not-working?replies=24#post-7743

[_ck_]

You can adjust the settings in the plugin to any size.

With broadband today I guess that won’t be too much of a problem but remember it’s passed through a PHP session so on an extremely active site that could in theory become a problem if they were publicly available downloads (the default locks downloads to members only, which is best).

[travelsuperlink]

I tried to understand the new database structure by checking the upgrade-schema.php. I found one thing could cause problem:

$bb_queries = “CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS $bbdb->users (

ID bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,

user_login varchar(60) NOT NULL default ”,

user_pass varchar(64) NOT NULL default ”,

user_nicename varchar(50) NOT NULL default ”,

user_email varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,

user_url varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,

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

user_status int(11) NOT NULL default 0,

display_name varchar(250) NOT NULL default ”,

PRIMARY KEY (ID),

UNIQUE KEY user_login (user_login),

UNIQUE KEY user_nicename (user_nicename)

);”;

my old database table bb_users the user_nicename does not have unique key on it, but now upgrade try to setup as unique key. will it be the reason for the upgrade timeout?

Unfortunately for my cpanel host I could not access the mysql log, but please help me solve this. any inputs are welcome.

thanks.

[chrishajer]

It looks like you have an extra db in there. So if your database is database, your tables are actually named database.dbusers, for example?

The default would be database.bb_users.

To change the table prefix your bbPress installation uses, there is a value in bb-config.php called $bb_table_prefix which is normally set to “bb_”. What is the value in your file?

To recover, you might want to rename all your tables using a prefix, then add that prefix to bb-config.php for $bb_table_prefix. I think that would work.

I think leaving the tables with no prefixes is a bad idea, because if you install other software in the same database, you might have a conflict with similarly named tables. Not every application behaves well and allows a table prefix. oscommerce used to do that (no table prefix, just tables with normal names that would step all over any existing similarly named tables.)

[nguyenp]

I was wondering where in the style.css file is the settings for the width of these columns? This is for the default theme. Any help is appreciated.

[chrishajer]

Also, before making changes to a stock template, you probably want to make a new directory called my-templates, then inside there a new directory called $whatever-you-want (maybe “forumtemplate” or “mytemplate” or “newlook”). Then inside that directory, copy over all the files and subdirectories from the bb-templates/kakumei/ directory. Now, in your new directory, edit the top of style.css to change the template name to something unique. Once you’ve done that, you can log in as keymaster, then select your new template, by name, since the screenshot will still look like kakumei since that’s what you copied over. Select the new template and look at your site. It should look the same as it did before, because you didn’t make any changes yet.

Now, confine all your changes to these template files, and if you break something you can always fall back on the default kakumei, or compare to see where you went wrong.

[cartmanffc]

tkanks but it didn’t work.

I have just give up on trying to do this and stick to the default order; I’m too busy to dwell on any more problems…

[chrishajer]

You can install bbPress in the same database as WordPress, it will use a table prefix of bb_ by default. It’s actually recommended to use the same database if you’re going to try integration at some point. So, there’s no need to create a new database, just use the connection details for the database you use for WordPress and ensure the table prefixes are different. By default, WordPress uses wp_ and bbPress uses bb_.

[bigcanoe]

fixed. after set the forum url to the default http://…/bbpress/. it works. why ? we can’t change it? or just because I upload bbpress to directory ‘/bbpress/’ ?

[_ck_]

For some reason I’ve never liked the default kakumei green and like kakumei blue much better instead. But other people can make it worth well enough on their sites. I only mentioned the blue option because the rest of your main site’s links and text are in blue and the green in the forum makes it look “foreign” to the rest of the site.

[my-apartment-map]

I’ve been working on this for a few weeks and its finally complete. There are still a few small bugs left and I’m sure I’ll find more, but I have launched the forum in its present state.

I’m using a few of _ck_’s pluggins. “Instant Password” and “Human Test”

I made quite a few modifications to the core to support what you might call “Virtual Forums” for lack of a better term.

My site lists apartments, I have pages for around 26,000 cities in the U.S. I wanted to have forum content on each page but didn’t want to create 26,000 forums for a few obvious reasons. The main being that probably 99% of the forums would never get any content.

My solution. I created 2 generic forums and 51 state forums. On each one of my apartment city pages I integrated the forum content from the state forum in which the city resides. For example, the Boston, MA apartment page would show content from the Massachusetts forum.

The trick is that if someone creates a topic from the Boston, MA apartment page, the topic is inserted into the bbPress DB with a new column that contains the latitude and longitude of Boston,MA.

If someone creates a topic from the Newton, MA (10 miles from Boston, MA) apartment page. The topic is inserted in the bbPress DB with the latitude and longitude of Newton, MA.

What this allows me to do is show forum content from any City in the U.S. with the forum topics sorted by distance (and secondarily by date) from the City the user is currently viewing.

To show you an example. (Scroll down under the map to view the forum content on the right hand side)

Boston Apartment page

Newton Apartment page

Each forum topic has the City and State that the user posted from prefixed to the actual forum topic.

As you can see the forum posts change order based on what city you view. This is not that useful without many forum posts, but once the forum starts to fill up it will appear that each city page contains a “Virtual” forum based on that city and the cities that are nearest to it.

Hopefully this will not only allow me to engage a much larger audience as most of the forum topics will be relevant to the page they are viewing.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comment. This is very much still a work and progress and can definitely be improved. The #1 thing I’m not happy with is the location of the city forums. I’m working on a redesign that would move the forums, or at least a link to the forums, up near the top of the page.

You can also view the regular apartment forum which has a modified very of the default template.

[chrishajer]

_ck_ – what if you wanted to use a different before character? I tried forum_description('before=x'); but that didn’t work. I couldn’t get before or after to work.

Can you explain how to use the arguments for that function please? Thanks.

function forum_description( $args = null ) {

if ( is_numeric($args) )

$args = array( 'id' => $args );

elseif ( $args && is_string($args) && false === strpos($args, '=') )

$args = array( 'before' => $args );

$defaults = array( 'id' => 0, 'before' => ' – ', 'after' => '' );

$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );



if ( $desc = apply_filters( 'forum_description', get_forum_description( $args['id'] ), $args['id'], $args ) )

echo $args['before'] . $desc . $args['after'];

 

It seems like the relevant info is listed right there in the $defaults array, but I couldn’t stumble upon the combination to make it work.

[_ck_]

Heh, Kevin you made what I had been working on at random times. A phpbb template for bbPress. Except my project was to use real phpbb templates and translate them into bbPress templates from the raw files. Kinda gave up on that one after the first week so I’m glad you made it happen (at least the default template).

To the best of my knowledge, no one has made a theme with non-table front-page/forum-page. But hey I have 5000 bbPress sites sitting in my db so I can do a scan for you later and let you know if any of them managed to pull it off.

This is a list of all the existing, public/free bbPress themes to date:

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/available-themes

Oh and yes, there is no documentation. This has always been a complaint, but no-one has risen to the task. The problem is bbPress has been constantly changing – there isn’t even an official/final 1.0 release yet, which is probably why no-one has pinned it down. The database from 0.9 to 1.0 changed somewhat radically too. Now that 1.0 beta is in sight, someone should probably start working on some notes for plugin and theme developers.

What would probably help is an official codex for bbPress. There’s an unofficial wiki but it’s barely used. If it was a tab here, that would be entirely different.

ps. I completely disagree with the idea of trying to uses lists where tables currently are. 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 am not at all discouraging you from trying it as it would be interesting to see. But lists for the sake of simply not using tables is wrong IMHO.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

FYI, the roles don’t always match up right until the user logs in to both sides of the game.

If I create an ID in bbPress, I have a WP role of ‘None’. When I subsequently login to WP, my role is flipped to whatever the default is. Done. Vice versa for bbPress.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I keep thinking back on this, and I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. I’m not speaking to the HTML/Code side of it, but the concept side. The code side, yeah, some function I would consider default is missing (Unread, maybe Allow Images)

But what’s the difference between a Forum and a Blog?

A blog is a journal. Few people make new topics, many people reply. A forum is … a forum. Many people make new topics, many people reply.

If you feel the code of a Blog is better suited to how you want to run your forum, cool. You want to use the highly structured IPB or phpBB? Have at I picked bbPress not because of the WP integration (I could care less, really) but because it gave me more options than just Category -> Forum -> Topic -> Posts, and because it’s small and lacks a lot of those fancy options.

Example? I don’t use categories at all. Don’t need ’em. I have three ‘fora’ for high level organization. I went off the same general idea I use on my Blog. Three categories, a ton of tags.

1) About the site topic (screwdriver.com is about screwdrivers, talk about them)

2) About the Website (the code behind the site, suggestions, ideas, etc)

3) Everything else (screwdrivers are nice, but I have this hammer…)

Three big, broad categories/fora whatever. The tags I sort of let explode. And even then, I’m torn between structure and free form. I want a little structure (so you don’t get tags like ‘hammer’ and ‘hammers’ which really are the same thing), but I also want freedom.

So function. If you can get all that in a blog, have at Many people do and we call ’em LiveJournal Communities

[chrishajer]

> My host says that getmypid is working.

> I built a php info file to check what modules

> were installed, and getmypid wasn’t there.

Well, one thing does not jive with the other. Either it’s enabled or it’s not. Do you have a choice between PHP4 and PHP5? Maybe they’re checking one version and you’re using another. If the web server uses PHP4 by default, but PHP5 is available, you can force PHP5 by adding this to the top of your .htaccess file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

To check which version of PHP your pages are being served with, and to see if getmypid is disabled, save this into a file called info.php (or anything.php really):

<?php

phpinfo();

?>

 

Then access that at your host http://www.example.com/info.php, and see what it shows.