[John James Jacoby]

Yeah some of my users haven’t updated their profiles, and BuddyPress doesn’t recognize them until either they do, or I force the info (which I will probably do.)

@TeddyC, it took me installing WordPressMU 4 times before I followed the instructions correctly, and I’d recommend not doing it on Valentines weekend so your girlfriend doesn’t hate you for a few days, but otherwise I think it went as smoothly as it could considering I migrated 200 users from WordPress.org/bbPress over to MU. There’s a few places where I had to trial and error my way through the multi-blog switchover and the URL re-writing still isn’t perfect (categories and postnames are broken?) and I had to manually dump the DB and replace all the directory references for all of the uploaded media.

Otherwise the rest was just tweaking and tinkering. Lots of it.

I’ve got the forums FULLY integrated now with BuddyPress, so single account access, cookies, and users are able to post to group forums from within the group itself, and vice versa. It’s a neat little bridge and I rather like that it’s all playing nice. Hopefully upgrading to 1.0 or new alpha’s doesn’t TOTALLY break everything too badly, although I anticipate that it probably will. Yay!

I am going to be using BuddyPress to do a small social networking site for a non profit, that is going to be incorporating some school related content, so I will let you know how that goes and be sure to stay in touch as it progresses. I’ll link back to it here if we decide to incorporate bbPress.

[Alvaro Degives-Mas]

richcon: mah plezure.

chrishajer stated:

I still can’t figure out why people want integrated logins, why they have users that both post to a blog and post in a forum.

I’ll give you a real-life example. When WordPress is not used as a blog, but as a CMS, and its support for registered members serves to allow restricted reading access (so, not even posting!) to certain pages / posts (or portions thereof), those members need to log in, so as to be able to read those parts that are off-limits to guests. Now, let’s imagine such a blog-turned-CMS has a forum as well. And that said members were put through the hassle of logging in again on exactly the same site – just to be able to access a forum, where they “really” participate and exchange posts. No explanation on technicalities like “cookie synchronization” could undo their irritation, and frankly, I’ve joined their chorus. If only because the customer is king.

So, allow me to invert the perspective here: why on Earth would anyone even want to justify a klutzy non-unified login system that doesn’t recognize users who logged in on one part to access another of the same site, that is driven by software that, ordinarily, ought to be considered siblings?

Don’t get me wrong – I very well understand and accept the premise of technical difficulty. I have no problem in assessing it as merely the way it is, and patiently awaiting (and appreciating) the effort underway to address this issue. But I see no merit whatsoever in attempts to belittle the annoyance and inconvenience to users – remember: they make the site worthwhile – by way of questioning the validity of expecting a unified login. Human logic and behavior isn’t necessarily always linear in its expression, but it is what one has to deal with, in order to lead a practical and profitable (as in: rewarding) life.

And this inconvenient thing called real life is what made me, in the end, opt for a non-bbPress forum solution for a professional association: because I’m totally, utterly, radically done with dealing with complaints from non-technically oriented member users about “not being able to access” the site that they in essence (through membership of the association) paid for.

Is this a majority scenario? No, of course not. But it is very real. Hopefully now you understand why there’s interest in a unified login system, shared among WordPress and bbPress.

(Added afterwards: if you’re looking for the forum, you won’t see it until you logged in – it appears in the navigation menu only after you logged in as a member. And for the really curious: I opted for the SPF route to solve the login issue, while still remaining in the WP family.)

[chrishajer]

There is no documentation for it really, at this point. It’s easiest to just look at existing plugins, and if you’re familiar with the way WordPress plugins work , bbPress works similarly.

There have been a couple of attempts at listing bbPress functions:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/writing-and-uploading-plugins

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/list-of-filtersactions#post-22463

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/function-list-for-v10-alpha-one

[davidjmartin]

I want to develop some plugins for bbpress, but cannot fid any documentation anywhere, is there anything that I can look at to get a list of filters/actions and what they do? bbpress looks great, but without any documentation for plugin developers its kinda hard to build for it…

Cheers.

[PJ Brunet]

@chrishajer thanks I’ll check that out.

But, I’d like to fix this problem because the URL of the “member” is very important to me. Should I start reading “https://plugins-dev.bbpress.org/” or? I’d like to help work on the code but I have no experience contributing to open source.

As it is now, the URL is not saved, it’s not even in the list on the profile page.

I’m guessing that’s the responsibility of the “bb_get_current_user_info( ‘id’ );” function?

I personally think clicking the member’s pic should take you to their profile, that would be more intuitive IMO. I wouldn’t expect to click the text “Member” to see a profile, and that makes even less sense if I give the member some custom name under his/her picture. Let’s say a member works for XYZ Inc. Now I want to show “XYZ Inc.” under his/her profile picture, a pretty typical use of the member’s custom title. To me it would make more sense to link “XYZ Inc.” to XYZ.com using the member’s URL. But the way you have it now, clicking “XYZ Inc.” takes you to his/her profile page, which doesn’t make sense to me.

[revilo78]

Thanks for the links. I was hoping there was a built-in BBpress function and it turns out there is one. I found bb_get_usermeta(), and everything worked great.

[_ck_]

Top 1000 gets updated with Top 100, sometime in April, maybe end of March if I have time, not before then. Look for the Firefox 3.1 release date as a guide since 3.1beta has a bug I need to wait for them to fix.

[whitewall]

Thanks for the very informative reply _ck_,

The reason I got interested in bbPress is not that we are trying to cut corners or find a cheap solution. It’s more like we would like to find a very simple and a lightweight bulletin board without built-in options we actually do not need. And somehow bbPress 0.9 looks much like what we are after.

Our forum has been running on phpBB since 2001 and the software has had it’s well-known problems. We have also tested the vBulletin – we have even the commercial license and have used lots of time and effort to make our other extensions work with it. But at the end vBulletin has too many options and it is too complex for our needs. We don’t need all those options it offers – we need a simple solution which would integrate nicely into our website.

We have already two dedicated servers (actual machines, not virtual ones), one handles the www-stuff (running apache…) and the other serves as the database server. Right now we have only the phpBB running with a couple of scripts of our own so I guess there’s resources more than we need.

The search issue would be solved by using Google’s search, that’s what we use right now with the phpBB but the lack of caching may be an issue.

Maybe we should keep searching the ultimate BB solution for us or try to customize the phpBB3 to fit our needs and figure out some non-WP solution for the WordPress post commenting.

[crimsonmai]

Ok well I figured out part of the problem and got the path set correctly. Now that it loads the formatting and tables are completely missing. Is this something that I change in the styles for WP or bbPress?

http://www.rivenwow.net/bbpress

[crimsonmai]

Sorry for yet another WordPress integration topic. I’m mainly interested in integrating my WordPress header with BBpress, and I’ve read just about every page on the topic. I tried the deep integration suggestions by editing my bb-config.php to include:

if ( !defined( ‘ABSPATH’ ) ) {

include_once( ‘../wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’ );

}

I’ve also tried setting the path to wp-load.php instead with no luck. I keep getting an error saying that the file or directory does not exist. My WordPress and BBpress installs are in separate directories, but on the same level. Ex:

/home/wordpress

/home/bbpress

Is the path I have correct? Also, I went through every file in the template and changed:

<?php bb_get_header(); ?>

<?php bb_get_footer(); ?>

to

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Are there any other suggestions?

Edit: Sorry I forgot to mention that I’m using WordPress 2.7.1 with bbPress Alpha 1 and my website is http://www.rivenwow.net

[hpguru]

Read this http://www.phpbb.com/community//viewtopic.php?f=65&t=673815&start=0

[hpguru]

Hi!

When the top 1000 list is updated?

[elfman2]

Ipstenu

It looks as if there is a very round-about way of implementing a crude version of this forum/blog integration in buddypress. Buddypress seems to come in modules of social networking components. One called “Activity Streams” can be configured to show activity (such as blog posts) of a member and his “friends” and display a list of it like a forum. Perhaps this could be tweaked to show only blog posts of all members, creating at least a common “read only” forum. Readers would just have to click through the list and comment directly on the blogs using another component called “The Wire” which seems to be a site wide component commenting system… kind of cool. But even if it works as suggested, all this by itself would still be very limiting.

Thinking on this further, to do this correctly, it requires database integration between the blogs and forums with no duplication of data. Here is what is needed:

– Posters to a forum should have the option to have their topics or comments viewed as an entry to at least one of the blogs that they have permission to edit.

– Bloggers should have the option to have their posts viewed as a subject in at least one of the forums that they have permission to edit.

– Comments to either should be visible in both forum and blog views.

– Edits to one should be reflected in the other views.

– Adding a blog-forum link (or perhaps even a blog-blog or forum-forum link) should be supported at any time by any person with the permission to post to a view that they are linking an existing post into (assuming the author of the original post authorizes that.)

– Deletions should be managed with an option to unlink the post from any of the views in which the author or moderator has permission to delete it from, and only delete the post entirely if it is unlinked from all forums and all blogs.

This is not rocket science, and it’s just the beginning. There is way more than just forums and blogs that this concept supports, and I think that the results would be just as explosive.

One thing promising about BuddyPress’s “Activity Stream” is documented as ”Custom components can also hook into the activity streams, meaning any sort of data can be tracked and recorded.“ Would that mean that a third party forum like bbpress, could be configured to use those streams to access blog posts and comments for exactly the kind of forum/blog integration outlined above?

[_ck_]

Let’s put it this way, if you have decent income from a forum of that size, you should not waste another minute your time (or anyone else’s) and just pay for vbulletin and the extra hardware it will need at that size (dedicated mysql and email servers). Seriously, it’s the best for a reason, but you will have to pay for everything once you go down that path, addons, etc.

If you are trying to cut corners and do it on the cheap, bbPress 0.9 is lightweight enough to handle it (wordpress.org has many times the traffic you do) though a dedicated mysql server can always help, and keep in mind bbPress has no caching plugins available yet. The money you save will be spent in hours of customization and tuning and creating your own fixes for problems.

You can always turn to lighttpd or nginx if you know your stuff and have days to fiddle with it or the almost instant installing litespeed, if you want an apache replacement that will double the capacity of your server.

The only cloud on the horizon is bbPress 1.0 as I estimate it in some cases will be roughly 30-50% slower than 0.9 (with still no caching plugins) and at this time roughly half of my plugins will not work with it (and won’t for quite some time, assume the end of 2009 at the soonest).

After 1.0 stabilizes and someone ports WP Super Cache to it, that will change the picture again but that kind of caching only helps visitors that aren’t logged in.

Oh and bbPress isn’t going to solve your search problems. It will only make it worse. bbPress’s search is completely non-indexed, and has virtual no options. My Super Search plugin might eventually cache searches but that’s not going to solve the problem of 1000 users searching for different things at once. I mentioned http://sphinxsearch.com a few months back and amazingly they are now using it on wordpress.com so there is hope that one day there will be a plugin for wordpress/bbpress to use it for searches on larger sites which will completely solve the performance problem.

Your groups of forums will require bbPress 1.0 and the downside of that again is half the plugins for bbPress 0.9 will not work with it. If you do install 1.0, don’t install anything more than 1.0 alpha 5 to use with my plugins.

ps. the top 100 list hasn’t been updated in 90 days and many of those forums are much bigger now – next update will be sometime after Firefox 3.1 is released

[johnhiler]

There’s an excellent Private Forum plugin:

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

And the ability to create and define custom user groups to access a particular forum:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/custom-user-groups

You mentioned a few social networking type plugins… have you checked out buddypress, the social network extension to WordPressMU?

https://buddypress.org/about/

It might be overkill for what you’re looking for, but at least some of the feature/plugins do exactly the sorta things you mention (galleries, pm, etc.).

Good luck!

[chrishajer]

Here’s a good reason from the WordPress release archive:

“None of these are safe to use, except the latest in

the 2.7 series, which is actively maintained.”

If someone was using a version earlier than 2.7.1 and got hacked, the WordPress forums would be all over them to upgrade and telling them getting hacked is their own fault for not staying up to date.

I run 2.7 vs 2.5 because the admin interface is so much better, IMO. I know some people hate it, but any time I use the admin of a WordPress site prior to version 2.7 I look at it and wonder how I got anything done.

I don’t think criticizing people’s choice to run the latest version of WordPress is helpful in getting bbPress on board with supporting it. 2.5 was released back in March 2008 and presumably work on 2.6 started around that time. That’s almost a year now that bbPress has had a chance to get cookie compatible with 2.6 and later. The alpha versions are compatible, but alpha is bleeding edge and unstable for production use. So, saying alpha is cookie compatible doesn’t help either, since that’s not been recommended for production use by anyone. You can look at alpha and see that 1.0 WILL be compatible, but WHEN?

I mean, bbPress docs still mention that it should integrate with the latest version of WordPress in the 2.5 series, and tells you how to deal with running OLDER versions. That’s pretty sad for software that focuses on “ease of integration” with WordPress.

Now, all this aside: I still can’t figure out why people want integrated logins, why they have users that both post to a blog and post in a forum. But, I don’t ask why. You can push the software around however you want. I don’t understand that but I do understand the frustration with not being able to get that to work.

Frustrations two and three:

2. getting bbPress to look like WordPress (that’s integration to many people)

3. setting up permalinks does not work like WordPress (you make the change in WordPress admin and WordPress modifies the .htaccess file. bbPress does not.)

Fix those things and the number of support requests here would be cut in half, possibly more, and we could focus on pointing people to or creating cool plugins to do everything they want to do with bbPress.

[whitewall]

Thanks for the replies.

We have had some performance issues also with phpBB so far, especially with the latest topics and phpBB2’s search system. Also phpBB is too complex for our usage because we need to customize the board for our needs and integrate it into our webzine and other scripts we will use in our website’s next version.

Our combination would be a wordpress installation for a webzine which will be managed by only a small number of our editors but it would be nice to have all our registered users to comment the posts logged in with their accounts.

Then the bulletin board should be readable by all visitors but posting is for only the registered users. We should have our 52 forums categorized in 5 or 6 different groups. And there are also various private forums which should be readable and writeable only by a certain user groups. I guess this is not fully supported by bbPress or it’s plugings yet?

Then we would customize the user profile page and user registration and management system into our own, because there will be paid “VIP” members and free registered users and users should be also categiorized in different groups. Also we have our own solution for the private messaging. I guess all this could be done outside the bbPress.

There are also few scripts of our own such as event calendar, classified ads, galleries etc. which would use the same user management / login system.

So the main usage of bbPress would be handling the forum posting, editing and basic forum stuff and together with WordPress and our own extensions they would make a nice platform for a social networking online community. Maybe some of these customizations and extensions of ours would even be possible to publish as a plugins when they’re ready and working.

We have studied also vBulletin and SMF but so far bbPress seems to be the best bb for our needs.

[johnhiler]

AFAIK, nobody’s worked out the WordPress 2.7/bbPress 0.9.x cookie/signin integration yet. If it comes, I’m betting it will take the form of a user-generated plugin… I don’t get the feeling that it’s on the official roadmap.

I agree that point upgrades to address compatibility would be nice! But I’m pretty sure that bbPress isn’t enough of a priority within Automattic yet to get the resources to make that happen. It sounds like that may happen within the next year tho.

As for the current state of things: I don’t think bbPress 1.0 is stable yet and more importantly, a good number the most popular 0.9 plugins aren’t yet fully compatible with 1.0. But that may change in a few months! In the meantime, I am hoping that bbPress 0.9 cookie/signin compatibility with the latest WordPress versions becomes possible with a plugin.

[chrishajer]

> Has anyone worked out the details in running WordPress 2.7

> with the current stable release of bbPress 0.9.x?

Not that I’m aware of. There was a reply describing someone going through the WordPress code to see what needed to change. I can’t find that reply right now.

[richcon]

I’m setting up a new web site, which is running WordPress 2.7. (Older versions aren’t an option because keeping them up-to-date with security releases is much harder.) The site’s going to need a forum, and I would like to use bbPress if I can.

Has anyone worked out the details in running WordPress 2.7 with the current stable release of bbPress 0.9.x? I know that seamless integration won’t be ready until 1.0 is ready, and if the developers say don’t use it yet, I won’t use it.

But if I do try to go with the current bbPress, what are the gotchas? Is there any integration possible at all, or do I have to wall them off as completely separate products with separate logins? If my client wants integration now, do I have no choice but go with something else like SMF?

There is one additional concern I have, though:

I had integrated bbPress 0.9 with a WordPress 2.5 site about a year ago, and loved how well they fit together — you guys really did an awesome job. Then 2.6 came out, and the incredible delay in bb’s WordPress integration seriously burned us. The web site got hacked twice due to 2.5.x security flaws that seem to be fixed in 2.7, and in the end we finally had to bite the bullet, delete the forum (it wasn’t getting that much use anyway), and upgrade WordPress. While the purist in me would love to work with bbPress again once 1.0 is available, I can’t shake this suspicion that when some future version of WordPress comes out, those of us who are using bbPress would get burned again because the developers are simply more interested in an ambitious future release that’s more than a year out. While 1.0 looks like an incredible release, a point upgrade to address compatibility would have been a really, really nice thing.

(Sorry if this sounds like a rant — I just would really like to trust this product again!)

Thanks,

Richard

[johnhiler]

That’s a really high number of posts and pageviews!

My bbPress forum is # 12 on that top100 list. It’s not nearly as large as your phpBB site but I’ll share the scaling problems I’ve come across, in case it’s useful.

Probably the biggest problem I face is that the Google Sitemaps plugin doesn’t scale very well. I believe the most popular Sitemaps plugin regenerates the sitemap upon every publish; this hangs my site every time someone comments on a post. I’m actually exploring the possibilities around upgrading or programming the existing sitemap plugins, to provide a more scalable solution here. But without a good solution here, my content isn’t as Google friendly as it could be.

Also, the Akismet spam solution is decent… but the bbPress moderation management tools aren’t as robust as they are on WordPress. So moderating the spam queue takes a decent amount of time a day, especially as the site has grown larger. If the problem continues to grow, I’ll look into plugin solutions to help out here.

Finally, the account management tools on bbPress aren’t very robust. For example, I get emails every day from users saying they forgot their username, or would like to reset their password. bbPress doesn’t currently have easy ways for users to retrieve a forgotten username or to easily reset their password (they can reset the password, but first they have to put in a username/password and fail a signin attempt). I’m actually working on plugins and theme changes to address this one now, but it currently creates a decent amount of work answering emails from confused users.

My final concern actually is around bbPress 1.0. I am very happy on bbPress 0.9, but version 1.0 is around the corner and seems to be a lot less lightweight than the current version. I’m also concerned about the lack of backwards compatibility with some 0.9 plugins. This wouldn’t be a huge issue, but bbPress 1.0 is currently necessary to ensure cookie/signin compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.

If you are considering bbPress as a standalone forum for a huge site, I’d definitely recommend it – as long as there are plugins for all the features you currently support on your forum.

If you’re considering bbPress in conjunction with WordPress, I’d hold off until bbPress 1.0 comes out of beta and/or a plugin supporting bbPress 0.9/WordPress 2.7 cookie integration comes out.

Just my two cents… hope that helps!

[chrishajer]

I find it easy to manage, and plugins generally provide all the functionality you need, but it is unstable right now there is no release date set for 1.0. So, plan on frequent updates, and, if you install 1.0 alpha, you might have trouble finding plugins that work with it since many of the plugins were written for older versions.

Explain “problems with plugins” on MyBB. Maybe the same problems exist with bbPress.

[chrishajer]

This was a discussion of getting bbPress data in WordPress:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/heres-how-to-show-bbpress-info-inside-wordpress-without-full-integration

Here is a way to get the latest WordPress posts and use them in bbPress; I imagine you could just do something similar to get with wp_usermeta:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/latest-wordpress-stories

[chrishajer]

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top100

There have been a couple performance related discussions on these forums as well:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/server-overload

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-faster-than-wordpress

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/get-latest-topics-performance-problem-and-solution

[chrishajer]

If your WordPress site is http://www.example.com/ and you installed bbPress in a directory called ‘forums’ one level below that (i.e. you created a directory called forums inside the WordPress directory, on the same level as WordPress folders wp-admin, wp-includes, wp-content) then your slug is ‘forums’, and it’s accessed at http://www.example.com/forums/ .

Now, if you’d like to have a hierarchy like

Home

Forums

Other Stuff

Some More Stuff

Then you need to create a child page with a slug of “forums” and a title of “Forums” and make the parent page “Home”. It’s all done within WordPress.