[Navjot Singh]

Please share your solution David.

[Navjot Singh]

Hey, please anybody can help me? I want to import SMF 2.0RC2 to BbPress 1.0.2. Any help, Steve?

[chrishajer]

Don’t use the same table prefix for bbPress that you are using for WordPress. That will overwrite tables. Make sure the table prefixes are unique for bbPress and WordPress.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi John,

I’m not proposing anything right now (maybe in the long term), but it’s not my purpose.

Its really jsut one of the topics i wanted to discuss at “Bob’s no show of an IRC meet” (it’s now official title until we hear from bob – who i hope is ok btw). I’m not a developer, i can code, but i’m very poor at it. I am though not bad at the bigger picture stuff, and this year i’ve had to move 2 forums away from bbPress (we’re only 7 weeks in), and i’m not sure that by the end of the year my “convertin to” will be more than my “moved away from”.

I’m totally cool if people dont agree, and i’m cool if people do. I’ve been wrong many times before, and will be again

But, um, please right more than “report it in trac”

Cheers

[Gautam]

Specifically, bbPress is effectively set up to meet singular criteria, and really struggles to be adaptable. I’d go as far as to say it’s far to blog like in data structure. I’m confident that if i had a few days off work (and with no kids) that i could easily make a wordpress theme that would look and work exactly the same as bbPress. That’s fairly disappointing.

Theme porting is not that much work, I have done that 2 times till now.

bbPress makes no attempt to update parent forums. It’s a major flaw that leads to forum X having no information on forum Y at all, even though they are directly related. Instead, in order to find this out, a plugin that makes numerous SQL calls every time a forum is loaded (and for every forum listed) must be created to fake this basic functionality.

Report it in trac.

Regarding moderation, in the latest trunk you can mass-delete posts and topics, and I have also posted a working patch to delete multiple users in one go and have the patch (on my local copy) to sort users by username, email, signup date ascending/descending.

[Gautam]

@KillerSneak

That problem is only for you, maybe some other plugin would be conflicting.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Last Thursday, after an email conversation with 3 people I respect from this board, i decided to take a look at the old bbProgress code. With a bit of dusting off, the weekend has seemed quite fruitful. there are though, still a few things that bother me greatly, and the more I delve into bbPress and the ability to theme it differently or extract data in a different manner, the more questions it raises.

Specifically, bbPress is effectively set up to meet singular criteria, and really struggles to be adaptable. I’d go as far as to say it’s far to blog like in data structure. I’m confident that if i had a few days off work (and with no kids) that i could easily make a wordpress theme that would look and work exactly the same as bbPress. That’s fairly disappointing.

It’s disappointing because forums and blogs are very different in their make up. Forums have genealogy and many to many relationships, while blogs do not. It’s not just a case of a feature wishlist, or replicating features on other forum solutions, it’s rather the mindset that bbPress has evolved with. The “this works for us” mentality. Here are some examples:

Genealogy

bbPress makes no attempt to update parent forums. It’s a major flaw that leads to forum X having no information on forum Y at all, even though they are directly related. Instead, in order to find this out, a plugin that makes numerous SQL calls every time a forum is loaded (and for every forum listed) must be created to fake this basic functionality.

Should your forum have no parent/child relationships (such as this forum and the WordPress support forums), then the issue probably hasn’t arisen.

This somewhat forces bbPress forums into linking via topics/posts rather than forum structure. I’m neither for nor against this, it definitely has its advantages for some forums, but for larger more structure forums where parent/child/child relationships are helpful, this quickly becomes very difficult when it doesn’t need to be.

More importantly, by only storing information in this blog-esque flat-file scenario, we’re keeping theme development very tied into plugins for even the most basic of information such as:

Forum – > Last Post

I’ve raised this one for a year and a bit now, but its a great example (imo).

Lets say, i run a review forum for restaurants in Pennsylvania (i don’t):

Forum

---

Topics — Posts — Last Post

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

USA

---

0 topics – 0 posts – No posts

– Pennsylvania

---

0 topics – 0 posts – No posts

– – Philadelphia

---

0 topics – 0 posts – No posts

– – Pittsburg

---

0 topics – 0 posts – No posts

– – Allentown

---

0 topics – 0 posts – No posts

– – Scranton

---

0 topics – 0 posts – No posts

– – – chinese restaurants– 1 topics – 1 posts – nom nom nom by fat albert

– – – french restaurants— 3 topics – 42 posts – i hate snails by Jody

– – – italian restaurants— 9 topics – 99 posts – i love pasta by Bob

Ok, so i hope this will illustrate the problem. According to bbPress USA, Pennsylvania, Scranton all have 0 posts in them, but that’s not true. They are parents in a forum sense, and have 13 topics and 142 posts under them.

The issue as a theme developer is that if you attempt to emulate the look/feel of any other forum software out there, then you have to make crazy complex SQL calls just to display the data that your users are used to. Or worse, (as i’ve shown in some real world examples) display “No Posts” on a forum that actually has loads of posts, just divided into their children.

I’m not saying that one way is better than another, but right now we’re stuck with only having data that fits one type of forum, and that’s one that has no need for parentage (such as this forum and the WordPress support forums).

Definition of Forums, Categories etc.

bbPress, in an attempt to roll in some backward compatibility of a plugin, included the “forum_is_category” meta. The issue here is that it’s a 1 to 1 relationship, a boolean, a yes/no; and yet we’re holding this data in the meta table, rather than the forum table.

What this means is that anyone pulling a list of the forums in a plugin, then has to compare each one to a different SQL against the meta table. Why isn’t their just a column in the forums table “is_a_category”? or even better, “forum_is_category”, and then no code would need to be changed in the existing “bb_forums()” loop. Why? well because if a forum doesn’t use categories because it has no need for parentage (such as this forum and the WordPress support forums) its not something they’re going to run into.

But of course, there is a bigger issue. A forum can only be a category or not a category. A Category is described (and categorised as) being Read Only and having Sub-Forums. The thing is, what if I want to make a forum read-only, but it already has child forums (for example, i want to make Philadelphia read only because i’ve divided the city into North/South as sub forums), would that mean that i want Philadelphia as a category? no. But that’s the bbPress definition.

bbPress has no way to add any form of settings or meta data to a forum. Forum A is treated the exact same way as forum B and forum Z, when in reality for forums rather than blogs, that’s not always the case.

There is no way to set any forum as read only, or hidden, or anything else. Forums don’t have settings, and why is that? because they’re exactly the same as categories in wordpress. Which suits the current need of one type of forum, and that’s one that has no need for parentage (such as this forum and the WordPress support forums).

A forum (n to n) not a blog (1 to n)

This is where the problem starts to expand. bbPress’s 1 to 1 reliance does not play well when attempting to assign other meta data. This really starts to throw issues as soon as your board becomes a certain size. Moderation is a nightmare because the whole n-to-n abilities of every other forum is non existent. Users to groups, groups to permissions on a forum per forum basic, rules on a forum per forum basis and per user and/or group.

Outside of WordPress integration the most common questions on this board are “how do i do X basic forum feature (read only, hidden forums, assign moderators etc)” and the answer is never good.

These are not issues for bbPress’s major role (the WordPress support forums), a forum with 5 sections, no parentage, and everyone is a WPuser already. But if you look around any of the “powered by bbPress” forums, and then look around any of the not-powered by bbPress forums, there are amazing differences. Those differences suit Automattic, and they may suit you (awesome if they do), but why do we continue to code/design/develop in a static flat-file based way that only meets the needs of one system, instead of assigning data in an N-to-N structure so that people can theme/develop/forum their own way?

My name is Kevinjohn Gallagher, and this is the 3rd February in a row i’ve written this (or v similar) post. I fully expect to be called an Angry Celt, “concern trolling” or whatever else is popular these days. In honesty, i’m holding my hands up to not being a great IA or Developer, and hoping that if i can raise these issues maybe we as a community can solve them.

Have a great day!

[Daniel Juhl]

I’ve localized bbPress to Danish, but how can I be able to localize timestamp/date?

[deadlyhifi]

Well done Taeo, that looks really great. A nice use of the ‘views’ to browse the various galleries.

Noticed one issue, on profile pages (which can only be reached through the UI Vitals panel and not by clicking on the Member next to their name?) it states ‘recent replies’ for both lists. One should be ‘topics started’.

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

I can’t see anything on that page but I guess you want to run bbPress inside a WordPress page or just want a matching WordPress theme?

Integration can be done by following my tutorial – http://blog.ashfame.com/2009/07/integrate-bbpress-10-with-wordpress-28/

and my bbPress resource page is here – http://blog.ashfame.com/bbpress/ in case you need any other help with bbPress.

[Taeo]

Heya,

I posted in a thread a while back about a project I was working on with bbPress and some people were interested in it so now that it is complete I thought I would share.

WoW UI Gallery

I have created a community website for enthusiasts of custom user interfaces for World of Warcraft. Users make a post consisting of a description of their UI, screenshots, and other various meta data. Other users can comment on and rate the UI’s that have been posted. And of course they can discuss further in the forum.

Aside from some small modifications to the profile page code (why isn’t there a template for this?!) all of the additional functionality has been achieved through plugins and theme code. I wrote most of the functionality into a plugin I am called bb-gallery. I am also using ajaxed-quote (detective), bb-ratings (mdawaffe), bb-topic-views (wittmania, _ck_), my-views (_ck_), and front-page-topics (_ck_, mdawaffe).

There were a few snags here and there but overall I was very happy to work with bbPress and it will definitely be my first choice for any other forum project in the near future. The site has been up for less than 18 hours at this moment but I’ve already gotten over 1000 page views and a promising lead for a possible “digg” effect of sorts.

If any of you are WoW fans I invite you to join the community!

[johnhiler]

This worked great for me in 0.9:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/read-only-forums/

It may not work in 1.0 though…

[chrishajer]

If you can log in at WordPress, navigate to the forums, still be logged in, and then log out and do the reverse, your cookie integration is fine. To test the rest (the reason you included wp-load.php) try using a WordPress function (wp_list_pages()) in a bbPress template and see if it works. Those would be good tests.

[kevinjohngallagher]

You’ve hit the nail on the head Aaronski, any form of moderation on bbPress is poor.

The simplist way to do this, is to remove the “Add New” link from your theme (simply add HTML comments around it), or you could hide the “Add New” link via CSS (which should be quicker):

a.new-topic

{

display:none;

}

The realism is, if your forum needs actual configuarable moderation, this might not be the software for you. Hope it is though, Kev

[Aaronski]

I’ve installed bbpress along with my WordPress site and so far everything is working great! Currently when you go to the forum, you can register, sign in, and start a brand new thread as a member. Is it possible to restrict members from starting new threads? I’m fine with a member having the ability to respond and comment on an already existing thread, but I would like the admin to have sole rights for posting new threads. Is this possible? If so, how would I do that? From what I’ve seen, there doesn’t seem to be much the administrator can do to restrict or modify user permissions.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[chrishajer]

Is this require_once('/../wp-load.php'); inside PHP tags near the top of your bb-config.php file? Like this

<?php

require_once('/../wp-load.php');

/**

* The base configurations of bbPress.

.

.

.

?>

If it is properly inside PHP tags, then there might be something wrong with the syntax of that line.

The other thing is, chances are the file is NOT located at the root of the server. You have it starting out here: / – which is the root. Might look more like this:

require_once('../wp-load.php'); if wp-load.php is located one directory up. You can also use the full path to the file, if you know it. Like this:

require_once('/var/www/htdocs/wordpress/wp-load.php');

Looks like the path is wrong there if you have it starting with a slash, at the root.

[thelobbyist]

Using bbPress 1.0.2 and WP 2.9.2

Where would I find my error log? And I’m assuming you mean when I add the deep integration code into the bb-admin.php file? Because when I don’t add the deep integration code snippet everything works flawlessly.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi there,

Can i ask what version of WordPress and what version of bbPress you’re using please?

Basically, the guide you followed was recorded at a time when we were on bbPress0.9 and WP2.7; we’re now on bbPress1.0 and WP2.9 so there’s been a large number of changes since then, and integration wasn’t something that Automattic had prioritized to make work.

Could you look at your error log to see exactly what is going wrong? until we know that we’ll struggle to help any more than guessing.

That said, your bbPress install uses “www” while your WordPress doesn’t. No idea if thats the issue or not, but given how difficult “deep integration” has become, it’s at least one thing to look at. Throw us your error log iff possible.

[thelobbyist]

I followed this guide: http://wordpress.tv/2009/01/23/integrating-a-bbpress-forum-with-your-self-installed-wordpress/

Did a fresh install and did everything the same except I did not use www at the start of my url’s and I did not deep integrate yet.

Worked flawlessly. And integration is seemless. But the forum theme I’m using requires deep integration.

So when I went to add: require_once(‘/../wp-load.php’); for deep integration it blows up again and nothing shows up at the link for the forums.

I think the problem is obviously something I’m doing wrong to get deep integration working.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance!

[chrishajer]

There was a “hidden forums” plugin, but it’s from a while ago:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/hidden-forums/page/6/

There was also “read only forums”:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/read-only-forums/

Maybe one will still work or give you ideas for your own plugin.

[chrishajer]

Just redirect the users to register for WordPress instead of bbPress. If integration is done properly, when the user logs in to WordPress, they will be loggged in to bbPress.

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/wordpress-bbpress-register-plusgtgtgtgt

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/how-to-redirect-all-registration-to-wordpress#post-19596

There were a couple other topics as well, but basically make all your register and login links point to WordPress, and remove those functions from bbPress files.

[radiothomas]

I have a WP/bbPress install that uses a custom WP plugin based on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/external-database-authentication/ to auth against our external account system.

This works perfectly well for WP, where the plugin will trigger on WP login. However, I don’t want my bbPress users to have to log into WP first in order to access the forums. Ideally, bbPress could use the same plugin (or follow the same logic) to externally auth and create the shared WP account if needed.

Is there a quick way to repurpose or simply invoke the WP plugin from bbPress? If not, can I hook the bbpress login in the same way as wp (in a “bb_authenticate” action)?

[thelobbyist]

Think I’ll just start from scratch and see what happens. Not too far into anything yet. Had this concern from the beginning. Want to get bbpress integrated and running before I leap into adding our custom theme, etc.

Thanks for the tip. I’ll let you know what happens.

[Dailytalker]

@Il Gatteo

Regarding smilies…how about this smilies:

http://www.dailytalk.ch/forum/stammtisch/ddd/

You need the bbpress smilies plugin and the smilies you want. Than you can replace the ugly wordpress-bbpress smilies with the smilies you want. Its easily done.

Regarding polls: Take the plugin “bbpress Polls”.

What I need is a much better BB_code toolbar Plugin and a facebook connect plugin….

[Il Gatto]

Hello

I recently updated my wordpress installation with a new theme; for the occasion plus some SEO reasons I moved the bbpress forum from forum.domain .com to http://www.domain.com/forum – the moving went ok and I have the website working fine (i’ve replaced all entries in the database relative to the forum position change – now the forum is in a subfolder of the wordpress installation, which is in the root)

except for one problem:

if a user is logged in in BBPress, it automatically logs out of WordPress; and viceversa: if a user logs in WordPress, it’s automatically logged out of BBpress – This is very annoying and confusing

also because in this new theme I developed for BB/WP, I’ve placed a link to register/login in both wordpress and bbpress pages; when the user logs in, it should display “Hello, Username!” – When the user logs out or is unregistered, displays another message plus links to register or log in – therefore it’s confusing for users because they are logged in BBpress but from the WordPress page they are told they’re logged out (in fact they are)

I’m making all users registering from BBPress – however sometimes they might want to comment the WordPress blog posts

the integration is working otherwise fine, because I’ve also the BB/WP synchronization plugin installed (blog posts are republished in the forums and forum discussion replies appear correctly in the blog post comment thread)

the only issue is cookies – how to solve this?

thank you very much