To me, this would be the single most important bbPress feature imaginable. Facebook, not OpenID.
–myballard.
OpenID is a means of authentication. Facebook is an authenticator. The problem is that the autenticator has opted for it’s own proprietary means of authentication, rather than using OpenID. In addition to its own API, Facebook could, should and probably will support OpenID. As of last month, Facebook has joined OpenID, but they’ve not implemented anything that I know of yet.
Next time you’re on Facebook, search for “Facebook should support OpenID” – there’s 800+ folks who agree. Which is a start, given that it’s developers, not hoi polloi, who are going to be concerned with this.
at the moment i think the only way to keep wordpress, bbpress and FB connect togheter is through an iframe that shows wordpress fb connect widget in bbpress.
somebody knows how to do that?
Hi everyone,
I was wondering if I could get some help on an issue I am having. I am trying to integrate WP functions into bbPress. I put in the following code in my bb-config.php, and wp-blog-header.php is being accessed fine.
<?php require_once('/home/noreason/public_html/youthbloggers.net/wp-blog-header.php'); ?>
Now, for some reason I get a slew of strange characters when accessing my bbPress installation (the frontpage). I can’t even access /bb-admin. I can’t figure out what the problem is, I think it may have something to do with my server settings/configuration because the exact code works fine on my local machine running WAMP Server. Does anyone have any idea?
You can see what’s going on at http://youthbloggers.net/forum/
I have buddypress Rc1, WPMU 2.7.1 and BBPress 1.0.6 Alpha installed and have it configured perfectly as far as I can tell.
My problem arises on the BBPress side of things.
1. From the Group Admin page in BuddyPress, when I create a new group and select “Enable discussion forum”, it creates the forum perfectly. Confirmed by seeing a forum with the group name associated.
2. I post a topic to the forum using BuddyPress’ Group Forum page, it posts, but says there is an error in posting. However when I look at the forum HOMEPAGE, it shows there has been a post made.
3. Here’s the problem : When I click on the forum that shows that they have posts, it’s empty and it shows the create new post form.
Any help would be appreciated!
Chad
Phil
I seem to be having a problem where the topics are being created in the database and the number of topics on the forum homepage are correct, but when you click on the forum itself to see the topics, it just says that you need to create a new forum AND every time I try to create a topic from the buddy press groups admin pages, it gives me an error that says “There was an error posting that topic.” but the topic is created in the database.
Confusion abound!!
Chad
Well, I figured that I would only have to re-write a few functions for authentication, but this would still require me to use the bbpress user table, no? For example, after I re-write the authentication functions, how does the bbpress software know who the user is… the user’s name, and so forth. Where are all of those functions that get that information? Are they included in the pluggable.php too? Is that bb_current_user()?
I know enough PHP programming to make my own functions, but I’m just not familiar enough with how WordPress works to know what is doing what in detail. Thanks for your help _CK_. I appreciate it a lot.
Hmm, yeah someone should definitely try to get the current repository transferred to another person. I’m pretty new to bbPress so someone else would be a way better candidate than me for rewriting this plugin.
Btw, what did detective’s mod add? I’m not even sure what I’m using…
Anyway while I was replacing pm_new_message with ck’s mod I decided to hack email notification in there at the end (formatting stolen shamelessly from the existing notification plugin):
$to = bb_get_user_email($id_receiver);
$pm_link = bb_get_option('uri') . 'message.php?id=' . $bbdb->insert_id;
$message = __("You have a new private message: %1$s nFrom: %2$s nn%3$s ");
mail( $to, bb_get_option('name') . ':' . __('Private Message'),
sprintf( $message, $pmtitle, get_user_name($id_sender), $pm_link ),
'From: ' . bb_get_option('admin_email')
);
What Chris suggests is definitely possible! I have four bbPress installs sharing a single user database… along with a WordPress install and a MediaWiki one. I’ll probably be up to 6 or 7 bbPress installs on the same user database by the end of the summer!
It’s not so bad to maintain, but it’s definitely worth is so far – especially since the functionality of each install is very different! For example, one bbPress install supports a Classifieds feature… while another one is a standard message board. If the functionality across the bbPress installs was more similar, I’d just combine them into a single installation…
Good luck!
You just type in a complete image tag, the full html, and it should work. Like this:
<img src="http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif" />
The plugin was sort of particular about the case of the file extensions; JPG did not work (IIRC) but jpg did. Also, some image hosting services that show images but don’t have an image extension on the URI won’t work with the plugin. The plugin looks for filenames ending in common image formats and allows those.
Also, the image needs to already be on the Internet already, hosted somewhere. If that’s not possible for your users, then you probably want the bbPress Attachments plugin:
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-attachments/
A possible compromise might be to have the PM functionality officially available (but as a plugin, not as part of the core). It would be written (or at least vetted) by bbPress staff… and even downloaded as part of the standard distribution. But each user could choose to enable or disable it, and it wouldn’t be in the core.
I think we’re getting close to that actually. BuddyPress has a PM plugin on its roadmap… maybe that can be adapted for bbPress.
The authentication system in bbPress is completely adjustable via plugins.
Look in the pluggable.php file, there are 4 routines that have to be replaced.
If you look at a plugin like my “freshly baked cookies” you can sort-of see the 4 replacements you need. Actually you only need 2, because the other two are used by the first two. One creates the cookie, the other reads it. If you only want your other software to create the cookie, then in theory you only need one function replacement.
WordPress works the same way, except after WP 2.5 they added 2 or three other kinds of cookies. The older method that WP 2.5 and bbPress 0.9 uses is easier to hook into.
Note that a few obscure WordPress plugins like to read the cookie to gather the username which is a bad approach. No bbPress plugin that I am aware of does this yet, and I hope they won’t so we can switch to a httponly cookie which is more secure and less XSS vulnerable.
ps. technically the auth system doesn’t even have to be via cookies but the only other ways I am aware of would be HTTPS Client Authentication which is impractical for public systems or maybe LDAP
I’ve searched and there isn’t a lot of *detailed* responses on how to do this. I realize that it’s very very specific to the system and the needs of the site.
I have my own authentication system and don’t need the bbPress system at all. How can I use only my system? I’ve read up on how WP does authentication– with one cookie containing the username and password hash (double hash I think). Do I need to create this same cookie… or can I easily just disable/remove the authentication built in and use my own?
If so, what do I need to change? Any help would be appreciated.
LOL, my thoughts exactly! Now I’m in contact with an outfit in India to see what it would take to code the site in Joomla!
What a rabbit hole this stuff can be!
Earlier I tagged this a BBMU, which is sort what this was sounding like, bbPress Multi User (like WPMU.) That way, you have one installation to update, but multiple blogs (or in this case, forums.)
I don’t think that is currently possible. There was some work involved to create WPMU, although it reuses a great bit of WordPress code.
So, I think you are stuck using multiple installations of bbPress, or just using the built in Forums that exist in bbPress. If you use the built in forums that exist, then you don’t have to worry about logins working in all forums. The logins will work in all forums because it’s all just one forum.
But, to have multiple bbPress installations, but just one user database, you might want to investigate the advanced database options upon installation, in step two where they talk about user integration.
Custom user tables
Only set these options if your integrated user tables do not fit the usual mould of wp_user and wp_usermeta.
User database "user" table
The complete table name, including any prefix.
User database "user meta" table
The complete table name, including any prefix.
I think here you would be able to enter the same settings for every installation of bbPress to point them all to the same user database. You could try it with two forums to see if that works.
Also, managing 10 forum installations is not too bad if you have command line access to use something like subversion. Then it’s just a matter of doing an svn up or svn sw and accessing the update in a browser. You can do 10 or 20 installations pretty quickly. It’s even faster when there are no database changes. Then it’s just svn updates.
If you’re looking at monetizing, maybe you have the ability to pay a programmer to accomplish what you’re looking for? Everything you’re looking for is doable (except making bbPress work like a WordPress plugin), but it might not be on anyone else’s radar right now. That’s not to say it can’t be done or won’t be done, but your priorities might be different from those maintaining the software packages.
If you want 10 separate sites, you can have 10 separate installations of bbPress, and they can all use the same database. You just need to use a different table prefix for each one (instead of the default bb_.) But, are you going to need to share anything between the different installations? If so, then this is not the way to go.
I think this is due to the server using PHP4:
Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode()!
What version bbPress did you install, did you integrate with WordPress, and what software is the server running?
I don’t know of a way to incorporate bbPress into a WordPress page. It’s not a forum plugin for WordPress. You can make them look the same and use some of the same functions, but bbPress is never going to live in a WordPress page. (I know, never say never, but…)
Here’s a Joomla! plugin that does what I want, except it’s for Joomla!:
http://boygj.com/juser-204-extended-joomla-registration
Excerpt:
• Ability to extend registration form with unlimited additional fields
• Different types of fields like Check Boxes, Radio Buttons, Select List, Text Field, Data
• Ability to create your own list of values to choose for fields of type Select List,
Check Box, Radio Buttons
Does anyone know of a WordPress/bbPress plugin that will do this?
Hi everyone,
I was wondering if it’s possible to have multiple forums running on a site (i.e. site.com/forum1, site.com/forum2) running from a single database
I have a site where I have about 10 completely unrelated topics and I’d like to create 10 seperate forums for them – bbpress looks like a brilliant, lightweight option and I’m really hoping there is a solution to this!
Yeah, ‘occupation’ is already there at the registration screen, but I need it to be a required field, and I need it to be a dropdown list that I populate with a fixed set of choices. I suspect I’ll end up going with bbPress since it looks like the deep integration (when it actually works) will do the backend on the cookies that I’ll need. When I asked about this at Simple:Press they said they might add custom fields sometime, and even if they do I’ll have to write the cookies.
bbPress is still better but i need to make a decision quick, the PM feature is lacking soo much idk if they’ve fixed the plugin yet.
you can always start a new field for a user and call it “occupation” or something…
however what i want is a stable PM feature, a built in one so i dont have to go chasing around 3rd party plugin authors websites, and reading tons of crap on what the next mod is to secure the bloody loop whole.
@swaymedia: At this point I have to say, neither, because they aren’t doing the one thing that will make monetizing a site possible – collecting important data about my audience that I can share with a potential advertiser.
We -must- have the ability to get a relevant piece of information about our audience that tells our potential advertisers something about the audience member’s buying habits. For my site, I need to know the occupation of my visitors so ads can be targeted based on that data point. I need a way to require that that bit of information be collected at registration.
Neither bbPress nor Simple:Press do that. And that’s absurd, because it’s THE only way to monetize a website through advertising. And it’s being ignored. Screwing around with fonts and colors is irrelevant in the face of this need. I really don’t understand it.
Hey Guys,
Just recently discovered that I can’t get my bbPress Forum to load. I get this error all down the page, and to the best of my knowledge, I haven’t changed a single thing since it last worked?
Any help appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Cal 
