[epiphone]

This is a interesting post.

Im currently running WP 2.5.1 and bbPress 0.9.2, and Im getting slightly worried on falling behind on WordPress upgrades. I think this the most success someones had with WP 2.7 and bbPress.

Im sure I’ve seen a WP 2.6.3 and bbPress 1.0.2 installation and it didn’t like it at all, sent out a redirect loop.

Thanks for sharing

[kevinjohngallagher]

Great answers again _CK_.

As always you bring an authoritative voice to this discussion.

“Tables have vertical rows that can be sorted which would be 100x times harder with lists. Javascript has specific abilities on tables that don’t exist in lists. Lists do not have vertical relationships between their “cells”.”

I’m going to be one of those guys here a sec and say you’re totally and utterly wrong about this.

The DOM of a browser treats a TABLE like an XML file that it iterates through in a singular parent/child relationship.

The DOM of a browser treats a LIST like an XML file that it iterates through in a singular parent/child relationship.

Both are sorted based on their parent AND their attributes.

The perception that tables are easily sorted natively by JavaScript is only brought to the fore because libraries such as jQuery etc. have built in functions to sort tables. The same underlying code works for lists in exactly the same way.

eg. The browsers DOM can’t tell the difference between:

TABLE

– TR

– – TH

– TR

– – TD

and

DIV

– DIV

– – DIV

– DIV

– – DIV

or

OL

– LI

– – SPAN

– LI

– – SPAN

Let me give you an example again; Back to the backpacker website (real world examples are good I find).

UK (Category)

– England

– – London

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

– Scotland

– – Edinburgh

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

– – Glasgow

– – – Travel

– – – Hostels

Now if we output these as 1 flat tables (even with fancy CSS tags), and we use JavaScript to sort it (lets say alphabetically), we get this:

Edinburgh

England

Glasgow

Hostels

Hostels

Hostels

London

Scotland

Travel

Travel

Travel

UK (Category)

Because, again, if things are in a singular flat table structure there is not way of knowing which child belongs to which parent.

Again, i’m only advocating the use of lists for the forums, not the topic list, which is a singular list, and therefore well suited to using tabular data.

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

What I want to stress here, because i’m feeling like i’m repeating myself a little and thats never good, is that i’m NOT here to get BBpress to change from tables to lists or divs or anything else.

What i’m here to discuss is that BBpress is going down a route, a route that solves one set of needs. Can you list the topics in a singular table in a singular order while the only differentiation between each row/cell is in the CSS worked out after the tag has been sent to the browser.

That is a very very singular way of doing things. My point is that all over the shop here in BBpress 1.0a we’re doing things in a singular method, and not in any way giving any for of extensibility to the software.

I use the forum parent/child output example cos it’s on the front page. I could use the example of having template functions HARD CODED in the bb-includes folder as opposed to being in the template folders. I could use the example of “forum” or “topic” being slapped before all the permalinks with no option to remove them.

Lets be honest here, in terms of changes from 1.0a1 to 1.0a2 the first 17 changes were style changes to the template file that we’re all (hopefully) going to replace with our own template.

The 3 latest changes to the repository have been to fix TYPOS in the comments.

There was 85 days, almost a 1/3 of a year between 0.9 release and 1.0alpha, and I may be wrong here but the biggest change seems to be that XML RPSeeWhoCaresAboutThisReally was added.

People are complaining about the same things on this board over and over. Most plug-ins were written over a year ago, and have been hacked to death. Vital information is stored on Page 3 of a forum thread started 18 months ago because no-ones updated the website.

Heck, saying that 0.9.0.2 the STABLE bbpress release doesn’t actually work with anything beyond 2.5.1 of wordpress, let alone the stable wordpress release of 2.6.3 ISN’T EVEN ON ANY OF THE WEBSITE PAGES. It’s stored on the forum software, in a random post.

This is not a complain against the great men and women who have done some marvellous work here, _CK_ so far is a screaming example of someone who’s given up huge amounts of time and created some amazing code, but come on.

If we try to develop something with no roadmap, no feature list; if we try to solve single problems with singular solutions; if we do this all with no documentation; heck if we do this with no project management whatsoever then we’ll end up with a bunch of things that look somewhere between a blog and a forum all with slightly different colours and a different header picture.

Then we can all pretend that we’ve build a totally extendable bit of software that every user has just decided to use exactly the same way out of pure luck, and not because they’re effectively forced to.

Heck while we’re at it, i’m going to pretend i’m Brad Pitt. Make believe is SO much fun. I’d suggest you all try it, but maybe you’re already there…

[_ck_]

Heh, Kevin you made what I had been working on at random times. A phpbb template for bbPress. Except my project was to use real phpbb templates and translate them into bbPress templates from the raw files. Kinda gave up on that one after the first week so I’m glad you made it happen (at least the default template).

To the best of my knowledge, no one has made a theme with non-table front-page/forum-page. But hey I have 5000 bbPress sites sitting in my db so I can do a scan for you later and let you know if any of them managed to pull it off.

This is a list of all the existing, public/free bbPress themes to date:

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/available-themes

Oh and yes, there is no documentation. This has always been a complaint, but no-one has risen to the task. The problem is bbPress has been constantly changing – there isn’t even an official/final 1.0 release yet, which is probably why no-one has pinned it down. The database from 0.9 to 1.0 changed somewhat radically too. Now that 1.0 beta is in sight, someone should probably start working on some notes for plugin and theme developers.

What would probably help is an official codex for bbPress. There’s an unofficial wiki but it’s barely used. If it was a tab here, that would be entirely different.

ps. I completely disagree with the idea of trying to uses lists where tables currently are. Tables have vertical rows that can be sorted which would be 100x times harder with lists. Javascript has specific abilities on tables that don’t exist in lists. Lists do not have vertical relationships between their “cells”.

I am not at all discouraging you from trying it as it would be interesting to see. But lists for the sake of simply not using tables is wrong IMHO.

[fontadoni]

Hello Ipstenu, thanks for your response. Sorry, I should have mentioned that the new bbpress board is actually on the same folder as the previous phpbb one (/forum), however, I get people coming from google trying to find phpbb pages like:

/forum/viewtopic.php?p=66sid=c72c343df3c37339b4d5094a1296566d

,but the new pages now look more like: forum/topic.php?id=38 on bbpress.

I was wondering if there’s a code I can add so people coming from google at least can be redirected to the forum’s index, right now they’re getting a 404 (sorry, I said 401 previously) because the old page can’t be found.

At least until google indexes everything again.

Thanks.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I cheat and look at this a lot: http://phpxref.ftwr.co.uk/bbpress/nav.html?index.html

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

You mean to just redirect one folder to another?

Pretend your old forum was at http://www.domain.com/phpbb2 and the new one is at http://www.domain.com/bbpress

Delete the phpbb2 folder and in your .htaccess add this:

RewriteRule ^phpbb2(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/bbpress/ [L,R=301]

That will make what’s called a Permanent redirect, and in theory teach site crawlers what’s up. Mind, a 401 is for unauthorized access, which is an odd error to get.

[fontadoni]

Now that I converted my board from phpbb to bbpress I need to know how to redirect the old stuff to where the new board is (so people coming from google can at least get to the new bbPress index and not just get a 401 – which is what is currently happening). I suppose I need to do this in my htaccess file. Does anyone have the code for this? Thanks.

[_ck_]

Total shot in the dark here as I can’t debug this code but try replacing in your routine above:

<?php // $top_topics = bb_top_topics(); ?>

with

<?php // $top_topics = bb_top_topics();

global $bbdb;

$where = apply_filters('get_latest_topics_where','WHERE topic_status=0');

$query = "SELECT * FROM $bbdb->topics LEFT JOIN $bbdb->meta ON object_id=topic_id $where AND object_type='bb_topic' AND meta_key='avg_rating' ORDER BY cast(meta_value as UNSIGNED) DESC LIMIT 10";

$top_topics = bb_append_meta($bbdb->get_results($query),'topic');

?>

[_ck_]

Upon further examination, function bb_rating_init() { may need further modifications under bbPress 1.0

Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with what to do with that query under 1.0 so mdawaffe may have to do it.

Just a complete guess, you can try changing line #94:

$query_args = array( 'meta_key' => 'avg_rating', 'order_by' => '0 + tm.meta_value' );

to

$query_args = array('object_type'=>'bb_topic', 'meta_key' => 'avg_rating', 'order_by' => '0 + tm.meta_value' );

[_ck_]

Try replacing this line #205

if ( $topics = (array) $bbdb->get_col("SELECT topic_id FROM $bbdb->topicmeta WHERE meta_key = 'rating'") ) :

with this one for 1.0 compatibility:

if ( $topics = (array) $bbdb->get_col("SELECT object_id as topic_id FROM $bbdb->meta WHERE object_type='bb_topic' AND meta_key='rating'") ) :

and use the admin menu to do a recount of ratings.

[chrishajer]

I believe it’s edit-forum.php in your template. Have you looked there? If you mean what in bbPress uses that, I can’t help you there.

[mithrandir321]

After much research it seems the view ‘top-rated’ gives no results. I checked the DB and found noplace where ratings are stored. It’s really mind-boggling and a little over the top for my knowledge

Can anybody please help. I have the latest bbPress 1.0-alpha-2 and bbRatings 0.8.5

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

… as long as we have tags (which are great) we feel we’ve a fluid cross pollination forum going on. But if you take tags away for a sec (lets say the users didn’t put them in); then what your left with is 1 list of topics and 1 list of forums. That’s the definition of rigid.

I see where we differ I see bbPress as ‘One big ass list of topics in one big ass forum.’ That’s not rigid so much as it’s just a list. Probably organized by last post date, but a list none the less. I don’t see it as rigid, I see it as unstructured. But I can see where you’d call it the other.

[kevinjohngallagher]

wow JohnJames, that is an excellent link and site.

I’m totally onbaord with the use of compliant tables for listing of tabular data. In terms of the topics, it’s 100% ideal, and done well by BBpress.

I also also totally agree that lists such as the forums, should be output to the screen as Definition lists with proper headings. Browsers wont know the difference (with the right CSS) and screen readers and search engines can better index. I might edit my example to do that tonight.

[John James Jacoby]

Screen readers and modified browsers might love lists, but they also love properly coded tables, of which most people really seem to do.

Google “everything you know about css is wrong” and check out how to style lists and div’s as tables, it’s an interesting read also. I don’t agree with it, but it is interesting.

The idea of a DIV is not to nest them, but to use them to DIVIDE content. The idea of a table is to compare data in a relational way. I think if you were going to use lists for forums, you would HAVE TO use DL’s and use dt’s for the headers at the very least, to provide a definition to the content being displayed.

I mean, I see how the argument goes both ways. (Off topic: If you’re really into accessibility, check out my WordPress section 508 theme at http://www.wp508.com? It’s not completely full of content yet, seems I have about 5 half finished projects right now ugh.)

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m not sure who has access to edit the information on this website (outwith the forums) but any change we could have :

<b>”Do NOT try to integrate WordPress 2.6 with bbPress 0.9 – only use WP 2.5.x – the reason for this is simple – WordPress has radically changed the way cookies are used. “</b>

oooh i dont know, maybe on the INTEGRATION TO WORDPRESS page?!?! or even on the download section.

How daft is it to hide it away in a forum when it’s quite essential information? If you download the latest stable wordpress and the latest stable BBpress – they’re uncompatable. that to me seems kind of important to new people who download stable releases of both to get started!

[John Doe]

Ok, it’s a slight fix since it’ll only solve one of the issues (I was having) with integration.

The problem was that I could not for the life of me force bbPress to set a ‘logged_in’ cookie with path ‘/’.

WordPress: domain.com

bbPress: domain.com/forum/

This meant once I’d logged in via bbPress, when I was browsing WordPress (although it set the ‘auth’ cookie fine and I could view wp-admin/) it ‘appeared’ that I was logged out (log in and register link, instead of log out and site admin).

I’d already tried this in bb-config.php, along with the other ‘integration speedups’ bbPress supplied;

$bb->sitecookiepath = '';

I’d also tried setting it to ‘/’ as well, but every time the cookie would not get set.

And here was the culprit; line 673 in bb-settings.php;

$bb->sitecookiepath = rtrim($bb->sitecookiepath, '/');

Then on line 735, it checks if $bb->;sitecookiepath is not set or empty. Otherwise, the ‘logged_in’ cookie for sitecookiepath will not get added to the $cookies array, and hence will not be set when wp_set_auth_cookie is called (specifically line 172, pluggable.php).

Changing the culprit to this fixed it for me;

$bb->sitecookiepath = '/' . trim($bb->sitecookiepath, '/');

The complete fix (for me) was to force all logins, registrations and logouts through bbPress with this in a .htaccess at the WordPress root;

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} action=register

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php forum/register.php [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} action=logout

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php forum/bb-login.php?logout=1 [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteRule ^wp-login.php$ forum/bb-login.php [R=301,NC]

This actually worked out better for me, since bbPress by nature allows you to skin the login, and users get to enter a little more info for their profile during registration.

Hope this of some help to others!

[kevinjohngallagher]

Thanks mate,

it’s definately a work in progress. the plan of it was not to emulate the CODE of phpBB press, but instead to emulate how it looks. As you can see, the difference between having the positioning and CSS in before the TR / TD is worked out allows theme developer far more options.

And oddly, screen readers and modified browsers LOVE LOVE LOVE lists (ul/li, or dl/dt/dd). they have buttons to skip right past the ones you don’t want based on criteria and this means sifting through the parent/child heirarchy so much easier than tables. For tables screen readers (much like the DOM itself) skips line by line.

So on my website, if you chose Eurpoe, and the first forum was UK. with Nested divs and Lists you could hit next and go to Ireland. With tables you’d go to the next TR, which would be england, then london, then scotland etc.

I want to stress here 2 things,

1) i in no way want to turn bbpress into phpBB, i just figured i’d use it as an example win my layouts, because as bloated as it is, it actually does the nesting output really well.

2) I in no way want this singular issue to be the only thing we’re discussing here. It’s one of many examples where i think we’er going down a particular route.

Finally…@Ipstenu : “I can’t visualize something ‘less rigid’ than the current iteration of bbpress type forms, since tags gives you a rather light level of ‘org’. “

This is feel is the crux of the problem, as long as we have tags (which are great) we feel we’ve a fluid cross pollination forum going on. But if you take tags away for a sec (lets say the users didn’t put them in); then what your left with is 1 list of topics and 1 list of forums. That’s the definition of rigid.

[John James Jacoby]

Wow…

It looks darn near perfect…

If your concern is catering to screen readers, then you know that phpBB is hardly the place to start, as reading the screen outloud to yourself makes no sense at all. Imagine if you couldn’t see what you were listening to, it would be impossible. That’s why (properly coded) tables for forums make sense.

I noticed the topic view was buggered, didn’t want to load and show anything, so I assume that’s under construction… But, that’s pretty super awesome…

[kevinjohngallagher]

Before i run off, I made this today:

http://www.kevinjohngallagher.com/___alpha/bbpress_as_phpbb/

Now, i’ve left $show_children=true, and added a crappy padding-left:20px to the CSS so that you can see the potential (though it totally looks crap).

The point of this is that 1) it works with existing plugins and 2) it doesn’t require plugins to work and 3) can be flicked back to the good old fashioned table stucture with a flick of a variable 9or removing the CSS padding).

The difference is that mine can be iterated through via the DOM and have the DOm understand the parent child relationship, and can be read successfully in the same way by a screen reader.

Also the HTML TAGS (in this case divs) for categories, parents, childs, siblings etc, are set up via a variable. So can be tables, divs or lists. All with the flick of a variable.

My point all along, has been, if we build something that can output one solution, then we’ll only ever meet the needs of that solution. If we build something that CAN meets the needs of many, then we meets the needs of the original (list all forums in a table) AND the needs of others.

P.S.

Anonymous posting is on, as is instant password if you want to register a fake account and have a wee look.

Now this is todays work, so dont expect too much, it’s merely a vehicle to show the potential.

EDIT: some of the forums are marked as hidden, so you may want to make an account. sorry, wanted to show it doesnt’ break forums and then went and hid one of the big ones. D’oh.

[kevinjohngallagher]

“But yes, yes, GOD yes, the documentation whomps. Then again, so did WordPresses back in the day “

Agreed.

But lets learn from those mistakes

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

FYI, the roles don’t always match up right until the user logs in to both sides of the game.

If I create an ID in bbPress, I have a WP role of ‘None’. When I subsequently login to WP, my role is flipped to whatever the default is. Done. Vice versa for bbPress.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

There has to be some level of organization to a forum, I think we can agree, since without form you have chaos and a splat list of data. Of course, organizing in a way that ‘makes sense’ is in the eye of the beholder.

I can’t visualize something ‘less rigid’ than the current iteration of bbpress type forms, since tags gives you a rather light level of ‘org’. Yeah, you still need some categories, but I don’t see how this negates a hierarchy, except in the case that bbPress cats are fake and, thus, annoying to me. Thinking back on the other forum software I’ve used, though, it’s all been a bit similar. You have a forum and sub-forums under that. So… okay, if that annoys you then, yes, everyone sucks equally

But what’s ‘better’?

The only option that would meet the no-standard output is something like an XML file that you format how you want. Dunno how you’d sort out hierarchy though. You’d probably have to treat everything as equal (i.e. it’s all ‘posted’) with flags for cat, forum and post in the SQL table to sort out output. But … Yeah, I can’t see how to unstructure it more.

But yes, yes, GOD yes, the documentation whomps. Then again, so did WordPresses back in the day

[John James Jacoby]

Well, I think that a theme designer and a theme developer are two different positions now, and to develop means to program, while to design means to mock the lay-out and intent.

And I’m okay with that.

Also, I think that tables are the most logical way to present forum data without mucking up the content with div’s and span’s. The theme files allow you to code your table rows, heads, bodys, and footers, so you can set your own distinction between cols and rows for accessibility sake.

WordPress suffers from this similarly, with forcing h2’s and ul’s all over the place when they should probably be h3’s or dl’s considering, and the alternative is tricking it into serving what you want, versus just ordering off the menu.

(I must be hungry with all these food analogies.)

Really, I think that you’re right, and that bbPress would benefit from some kind of WordPress-esque codex, because otherwise I’m forced to decompile the included themes and fit them to my needs, which is a good way to learn, but a bad way to be efficient.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi _CK_,

Firstly, sorry about the gender thing (I blame going from French to English – to simplify I make everything masculine).

I’ve used the categories in 1.0alpha CK, and they do work wonders in the back end.

You make a number of really good points here, really good ones so if it’s cool I’ll go through them one by one.

It’s not just that I don’t “immediately see the solution” (though I admit I don’t), but lets run with that for a bit There is no documentation, there is no list of tags I can use and their features (e.g. https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags) which starts to make a lot of template development guesswork. Are we honestly at the stage of saying that any theme designer or developer out there now needs to be a PHP guru and also know BBpress inside and out to be able to produce a non-liner theme?

If we are, maybe, just maybe that why we’ve found it so hard to get people to use BBpress; and maybe that’s why almost all of the themes out there look the exactly same.

Heck, even when I did manage to code a solution, I found that so much of the template is NOT in the actual editable template but in the damned /bb-includes/template-fucntions.php file that I was close to giving up. (this btw is another example of how NOT theme developer friendly BBpress is – there is NO documentation on how to overwrite these functions in a theme, and I’m somewhat confident that it’ll need a plugin – which also can’t be distributed in a theme).

I totally understand and am impressed with BB1.0alpha’s understanding of categories and forums in a parent/child hierarchy. The backend totally seems to grasp them – and in fact I’ve used the ‘forum is categories’ plug-in with 0.9 and it worked really well (congratulations and thanks whoever developed it).

But you’ve hit on the crux of the problem with “the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet”.

This is the ‘mindset’ I was talking about originally. You’re coding and what you’ve given this community is amazing and without reproach, so hopefully you won’t mind me using you as en example.

What we’re doing is effectively plastering over the crack. We’re fixing the… visible bit of the problem (does that make sense in English, it’s a bit like “tip of the iceberg” thing which makes no sense in french). Let me hark back to your impressive Unread Posts plug-in (which is wonderful). Rather than actually say ok this FORUM or TOPIC that we’re iterating though has unread posts, you coded a plug-in that ONLY worked it out when building the CSS of the actual forum name. It’s like, shooting the small fish downstream and then having to constantly go back upstream when someone points out that the bigger fishes are still there.

People want Parent/Child? Sure we’ll make the change in the DB and admin.

People want Categories? Sure we’ll give it to them in the DB and admin.

People want to make changes to the template? Sure we’ll only work out if its’ a parent/child in the CSS because no-one has specifically asked us via a letter from the queen to give it to them in the $GLOBAL[‘forum’] variable 2 lines above. I mean, we COULD work it out before hand, but why would we do that, because then people could do what they wanted with the theme and CSS – heck they wouldn’t be stuck to using tables in a linear fashion and… oh, no, wait…

It’s… fire fighting, it’s fixing the visible bit of the problem without actually tackling WHY people might have spotted the issue. It’s not a complaint, truly it’s not, the coding that’s been done is wonderful and I’m always impressed by it; but the mindset the thought process behind these features, isn’t wide enough.

You yourself can see how scarce this and bbshowcase forums are, it’s hardly a bustling thriving community. If we’re honestly waiting for someone to specifically come and ask for processing to be done at the earliest stage possible and not just at the CSS level then we may be waiting a long while.

I appreciate that it’s “Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like” for someone of your obvious expertise, but not everyone in the community could do that. And while I think I could make a decent stab at it, not everyone here could, and certainly not everyone who could design/develop a theme could. Not to mention that as a THEME we’d need to specify plugins that need to be installed at the same time. Surely the good developers here at BBpress can see that’s not how a THEME works in wordpress.

What we’re effectively doing is adding a double step. We’re saying that to be a theme developer, you need to be able to code PHP plugins and be able to read, sift, assume and work out all the relevant tags/functions/classes/object without any documentation. That’s a massive massive assumption. Which is what my original mindset point was – we’ve effectively built a piece of software that’s really good for us the “open source loving / developing / community” but not good for the average user/owner.

BBpress has so much potential, and whether people in the community think that my particular examples are valid or not (we are all entitled to our opinion), surely we can all agree on certain points:

Making BBpress website structure and look fit into a more wordpress.org format will help people stick around:

Increasing the documentation will make things a lot easier.

Not presuming that template developers are PHP wizards.

Making the structure of the core files match WordPress more.

I, like all of you, want BBpress to be better. But right now we’re going down one path, and the more we go down it, the harder it will be to allow people to take their BBpress forum in it’s own direction.