@bradsucks – So, I’ve put some thought into the situation that you’re in, and RC1 will include some tweaks to how this works which will hopefully help.
The issue, is that we want to make it easy to get forums up and running, without a bunch of configuration, and the easiest way to do that is let WordPress handle things naturally, and display the forum archives when you navigate to:
domain.com/%forum_slug%/
But… everyone wants to customize the way their forums look and work (even me) so that isn’t always optimal, and there is only so much you can do before the real answer involves creating your row custom theme.
Anyways, before the archive templates were created in bbp-twentyten, a page-template was used to let you put your forums anywhere in the page hierarchy of your site that you want, but that wasn’t obvious enough and not everyone wants to use the hardcoded template file either.
So then I introduced shortcodes, which allow you to put your forums and topics in any post or page you choose, but if you do that, there’s no real way for bbPress to *know* where you put your forum root in the breadcrumb without you manually telling it in the forum settings.
As you can see, it’s gotten complicated to try to satisfy the golden 80%, including myself.
Part of the change that is coming in RC1 is a check to see if a WordPress page exists where you have configured your forum index to be. Normally WordPress would override and show the forums archive, but I make it dump out your page instead. This way you’re able to setup a WP page with whatever you want in it, and have it do whatever you tell it to. The potential caveat here is when people try outsmart the software, create a page with the ‘forums’ slug, and wonder why bbPress doesn’t automatically make forums appear there.
Hopefully RC1 and beyond will satisfy the needs of 80% of users. If so, I’m satisfied supporting the other 20% that want something more tricked out.
I think one of bbPress’ biggest strengths is its potential to extend upon and empower WordPress’ commenting system. Another side of this is the P2 theme used to enable real-time conversations, but that’s a different topic.
‘Distributed conversations’ should facilitate persistent on-topic discussion.
The basis of this idea has already been put to the test on the TED.com website. For an example, follow this link to the Beware online “filter bubbles” video and scroll down to see the “TED CONVERSATIONS”. That is, in essence, what I’m proposing here, along with a new idea (comment conversion).
How would this work?
A) Create conversation directly from a blog post. (TED way)
See mockup:
https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#tcky31h/qjXSc0
http://i.imgur.com/fS4Yo.png
A:
Every blog post should come with a “start a new topic” link. Clicking this link would start a standard ‘new post’ prompt. The only difference would be the link to the discussed blog post, which could be incorporated in a number odd ways. The easiest way I can think of would be a shortlink with blog post ID. (Although it’s outside of the initial scope, this should also be compatible with forum posts).
B:
Comments can be converted to forum threads. A conversion would:
1) Lock the thread of comments
2) Create a new forum thread with the comments.
3) Link to the new forum thread from the locked comment thread.
This option would only be available to moderators and above.
Maybe not in core, but I could see this being a super handy plugin.