[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.

[whitewall]

We are looking for a new bb-platform for our online community which has over 20.000 registered users and our phpBB has now 1,2 million posts on 52 forums. There are 30.000 new posts every month and about 1,2 million pageloads per week. In the rush hours there have been over 500 users online at the same time.

I find bbPress very interesting but will it be able to handle the load our bulletin board will have?

[revilo78]

I currently have user data stored in the wordpress tables of my merged bbpress/wp site. Does anyone know how I can get that data in bbpress? Is there a function or a plugin? If not, would there be any problems if I did a MySQL query?

[norbyson]

Hi all,

Lately, I been contemplating switching to BBpress from MyBB1.4 (http://www.mybboard.net/) . I am wondering if it is worth the move.

I compared the two here: http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/bbPress+MyBB

It seems to me that the main difference is there are more plugins I would have to install with BBpress whereas on MyBB they are included.

The reason I am considering the switch is because there seems to always be problems with plugins on MyBB, otherwise I am happy with it.

So I am wondering, how reliable/user-friendly is BBpress? More specifically, are plugins and other Mods relatively trouble-free to work with? and overall, is relatively easy to manage?

Of course, I understand this probably isn’t the best place to ask about this. I would appreciate it if you could keep your opinions as unbiased as possible.

On a similar note, is there anyone that switched over from MyBB? and if so, Why did you switch over?

[meinwalter]

Hi guys,

i want to have the same theme from WordPress in my bbpress forum. Therefore i add require_once('../wp-blog-header.php'); in my bb-config.php . Then i can load the bbpress forum but it have the old kakumei theme. What should i do ? Delete the last three lines from bb-config :

if  ( !defined('BB_PATH') )

define('BB_PATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '/' );

require_once( BB_PATH . 'bb-settings.php' );

But then the forum doesnt knoe the bbpress functions. Can somebody please help me?

Thank you in advance.

[OthelloBloke]

Hello

I use Eblah SQL Beta 4 for a few forums and so far it hasn’t let me down over ANY of the major forum packages out there.

But I want a php forum for various reasons. Has anyone written a converter? Or is anyone willing to look at writing one?

You’d have a very greatful bloke right here if so.

[chrishajer]

@KnowingArt_com

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bbpress-signatures/

[Trace]

Thanks for your help Chris! I’ve gone through that tag with a fine toothed comb…

Anyone interested in taking a quick paid job sorting out this cookie integration issue, please ping me at tracedef @ gmail … Thanks!

[chrishajer]

You can post your contact information here. If you do, the topic will be closed and people can contact you outside the forum. But first you might want to browse the WPMU tag:

https://bbpress.org/forums/tags/wpmu

[Trace]

I’ve spent two days trying to integrate BBPress Alpha 6 cookies with WPMU 2.7…… I’m not really wanting to do day three, is it against the rules to ask for paid help here? If not, I would love to give my money to be able to move on and actually get some work done! If it is against the rules… I’m sorry… couldn’t find anything regarding this and am kind of desperate

[PJ Brunet]

In it for the long haul with bbPress:

http://www.satnightspecials.com/

Hook me up with some link love please

Installed the alpha last night, hacked the theme all day today, my friends don’t even know it’s live yet.

[chrishajer]

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

[chrishajer]

Also, looking at the path to the files, it appears they are using NFS which has generally poor performance (SLOW) for software like bbPress and WordPress.

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-is-slow-like-godaddy-says#post-21750

[Process of Illumination]

Hello,

i just integrated my 1.0-alpha-6 BBpress installation with my WordPress 2.7 blog.

After the integration my bbpress admin disappeared, but i could log in as an admin using the wordpress admin ID and Password, so no big deal.

The problem is this: when i log in with my WordPress admin account there is no way i can see my “settings” label, that used to be on the top row, extreme right, of the control panel: /forum/bb-admin/

Any suggestion/advice, please?

the Process

[_ck_]

One final addition to this that I didn’t think of mentioning earlier.

To use bbPress queries like these on a foreign (non-bbPress / non-WordPress) PHP page, all you need to do is include the bbPress core like this at the start:

<?php require('/local-path-to-bbpress/bb-load.php'); ?>

or to load WordPress core use this

<?php require('/local-path-to-wordpress/wp-config.php'); ?>

(change the ‘local-path’ bit to your local path)

and remember to use $wpdb on WordPress pages, vs $bbdb on bbPress pages.

[_ck_]

Yup “order by rand()” is very handy.

I used it for a mod for WordPress years ago to make a “random” category which is very useful.

It could even be done to make a “random topics” view in bbPress but not sure how useful that would be.

It’s fine for casual use but keep in mind for larger tasks it’s very slow and makes mysql purists shudder.

[deadlyhifi]

As an aside, some hosts such as GoDaddy can take around 30 minutes for the .htaccess file to be read and implemented.

[frank1000]

Hi chrishajer,

Thanks!

I added the additional Options line and it works now.

Regards

Frank

[chrishajer]

Yes, that’s permalinks and what you did is what I expected would fix it. Are you having any other problems?

If you ever want pretty permalinks set up, you can follow this:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/created-a-new-forum-but-profile-viewedit-not-working#post-24005

[chrishajer]

There was also this more recent discussion. Read the post from sambauers:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/important-notice-about-10-alpha-7-and-_ck_-plugins#post-23813