[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.

[lorenzocoffee]

Hi,

any news about integrating the incoming WP 2.7?

I just need (as most of you) to automatically post in BBpress the WP posts,and to made them commentable on there (BBpress).

thanks.

[John James Jacoby]

lol I gotchya…

I have been working with bbPress for 2 days now, so I can openly admit that my knowledge on the inner workings of it (and maybe its limitations) is limited to those 2 days of study.

From my experience with forum software, the category vs forum debate and struggle basically exists in a similar way, at least I know it does for phpBB. A category is just a forum without the ability to post directly to it, and I think that’s really the only way to do it without joining or adding an additional query that isn’t really necessary.

I think what it sounds like you’re asking for is something more official like what WordPress has in terms of development cycle, acknowledgment, and respect from its developers. I also think that because almost everything for bbPress is a plug-in, that the opportunity for those plug-ins not to play nice with one another is greater.

So, the dilemma is to package these as features within the forum, or allow the community to create those features when they are needed. The big guys bloat their forums with tons of stuff and allow the admin to turn them off, and bbPress does the opposite.

I’m not sure bbPress really has a development plan anymore other than tweaking and steamlining the code to work better with WordPress, and maybe eventually import/export posts from other forum software. I personally think that better user management would be nice, but that brings up how WordPress doesn’t really care about users at all. Ha!

[John James Jacoby]

Check this topic…

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/integrate-wp27-and-bbp10a2

Then, check it again for exactness…

Then, check it a third time…

It took me a little back-and forth, but I was able to make all of my logins and logouts work in every direction without any hacking of the core files or additional plug-ins.

[kevinjohngallagher]

2 wonderful replies. Excellent to have a frank discussion like this.

I’ll deal with them separately if that’s ok?

@Johnjames

I do love that BBpress allows the owner to specify how much of what type of emphasis can be placed on what area of the discussion, or to add/remove features based on plug-ins. I’m all for that.

What I’m saying is, that the way we currently handle things, and the way we currently build things actually negates that. If you want a hierarchal system, you can’t have it. Categories are just forums. We don’t iterate though levels to produce our structure where Forums belong to Categories. Because Categories are just forums with an extra DB mark, there’s no ownership.

(yes at the back end we can set the parent/child relationship up, but at the front end we don’t have access to that information).

Infact, from a template perspective, we only access the information about the forum’s relationship with those around it (parent, child, sibling, uncle, nephew) when we work out the CSS – AFTER the table has been created. This entirely nullifies the option to handle a feudal system with controllable Parent / Child options for the owner / theme developer.

(the call to the BBloop->classes() that works it out only returns a string of CSS classes instead of an object we can use to work things out ourselves).

As someone who deals with accessible websites a lot, I can tell you that outputting tables for a list of the topics is great. Outputting a flat table with different CSS (that gets stripped by the screen reader) for a hierarchal parent/child relationship is totally pointless. Going the other way, for our more fancy theme developers, it really messes up JavaScript iterating and controlling the DOM; and also starts to cause real issues with CSS layouts on older /non-standard compliant browsers.

(ever wonder why all the BBpress themes all look really really similar)

My point is, if I want to go with the flat list of topics as many do, then BBpress lets me, which is ace. If I don’t though, then BBpress starts to cause me huge issues. I’m all for owners being able to choose to do as much or as little as they want with BBpress – but right now, with the current set up, choosing to emulate the basic STRUCTURE of the bigger boards simply isn’t an option.

Yes we can do it in the back end (categories > forums > forum > forum > topic) but we cant do it in the front end; because we don’t iterate through the parent/child relationships like we would say… an xml file, instead we just list all the cats/forums.

To keep with your Pizza analogy, if you said “What do you want on your pizza” and I said “tomato, and give me a coke and fries too” – but when I get the pizza delivered the fries are on a coke drenched pizza. Oh what, you didn’t want it all mushed together in a single item? SWOwman, sorry, what you meant to say was:

Pizza

– Tomato Sauce

– Cheese

– Pepperoni

Drink

– Coke

Side order

– Fries

Shit man, we just mush all that stuff together with no differentiation until it’s output (see we’ve slapped the coke label on the side for you).

Basically, having a standard output that is rigid doesn’t make us more robust, it makes us less flexible. And that, as you have pointed out JohnJames, is one of the joys of BBpress. It’s flexible in so many ways – just not this one.

(and this is just one example)

[fontadoni]

I know you guys do not support the script I used for converting my board to bbpress, but I just want to know if this ID issue is something I should worry about or if it’s not a big deal?

Thanks.

[johnhiler]

_ck_ just wrote a great plugin that does what you’re asking for, I believe:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/related-topics/

[_ck_]

Actually, the way categories are done in bbPress is in part done for backward plugin compatibility with 0.9 (which will likely be around quite awhile, at least a year, due to it’s performance over 1.0)

And the way it works is just fine too – just because you don’t immediately see the solution you want to breakdown the categories before or after the loop, doesn’t mean it’s not there. bbPress 1.0 truly does understand that a forum is a parent of another and if it’s a category holder for it – the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet. Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like, and using a single carefully crafted mysql query, you can literally walk the reverse chain of post->topic->forum->category.

If you want forums broken down into categories with say three categories and three tables, either write a plugin or do it in the template to build a new array of $forums[1], $forums[2] etc. But don’t change the original way bbPress works to return $forums as all the forums or it will break existing plugins.

These kinds of feature growing pains were also present in WordPress, I can assure you – I’ve been using WP since 1.5 and I really long for the good old days of 2.0-2.1. The problem is that big leaps tend to break big things, or make them overly complex. WordPress 2.7 is a perfect example of things going very, very wrong with care towards backward compatibility and massive feature bloat, even worse than the 2.3 cookies and tags changes.

bbPress 1.0 is getting more things right from the start than WordPress did – cookies, tags, object cache, are all the more advanced methods right off and will save some headaches for plugin developers down the road (not so much for us 0.9 plugin developers).

Everyone has a different view of what’s missing in bbPress – from my standpoint the two biggest problems are 1. search sucks (so does WordPress’s after half a decade still) and 2. the ability to move posts between topics really needs to be done in the core asap so plugins know how to deal with moving targets.

ps. it’s “her” plugins not “his”

pps. you should be impressed how easy it was to make the topic/forum row affected instead of the title in Unread Posts – I can’t think of any other software that would be so easy. Hidden Forums is another example of the power of bbPress’s filter design.

[geekoid]

Well, now I’ve gone and done it. I installed bbpress 0.9 first then installed WordPress mu 2.6.3. I then tried to turn on integration, and now my bbpress installation is completely broken. I cannot login as I get the error:

bbPress database error: [Table 'web_forums.wp_users' doesn't exist]

SELECT ID FROM wp_users WHERE user_login = 'admin'



bbPress database error: [Table 'web_forums.wp_users' doesn't exist]

SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE user_login = 'admin'

My databases for WP and BBP are separated. Is there a way to reverse the integration? I cannot drop the database as there are existing users and posts.

I only realised this would be a problem after the fact, when I came here searching for a solution. If anyone is able to help me I’d greatly appreciate it. I’ve searched the forum posts extensively and looked through the bbpress configuration file to no avail. I hope someone can assist as I am at a loss on how to fix this.

[Silvanovicz]

Hi guys – I’m looking for a way to pull in ~5 related threads in posts, in a similar way you can install a plugin to show related posts.

So if I were to write a post about Britney, it would show up to 5 threads in bbPress that have either been tagged with Britney or based on the content in the thread.

Any idea if such a plugin exists, or if there already is a way to do this?

[John James Jacoby]

It’s really almost impossible as the role data is serialized within the wp_usermeta table… I was poking around in there and figured it was best left alone, even if it’s not working, it ain’t quite totally broken yet.

I’ve found that when I have everything all hooked together, that the capabilities of my users seems off. Like as it sits right now, with WordPress and bbPress together, I can’t even make a topic or reply.

I think that the problem takes places in bb-includes/capabilities.php, somewhere around line 29

$retvalue = call_user_func_array(array(&$bb_current_user, 'has_cap'), $args);

For me, this function returns nothing when the value is indeed true or 1 in the $bb_current_user array… But it only messes up when WordPress is included in the bb-config.php file, otherwise it’s fine…

[saberj]

Well, it’s good to know that I’m not the only one with something funky going on. I have hundreds of members, and the one Key Master I setup during the install. Nobody else has a different role set, even though the User Role Mapping is filled out. Very bizarre. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to change that manually, either.

Edit: Just checked – Users created in BBpress get assigned no role in WordPress as well. It seems that everything works in the Sync except Role mapping.

[saberj]

I’m working a new version of my site, and I’m working in BBpress. I tried the latest stable version, but since I was already using WordPress 2.6.3, things didn’t quite work right. So I switched up to BBpress 1.0 Alpha 2, and things mostly work right.

However, I’m still facing a couple problems. Most importantly, the User Roles map doesn’t actually map users to the appropriate setting. It doesn’t map them at all, in fact. My admin blog users are still listed as just regular members on the boards. Does anyone know why that may be? I also can’t appear to edit the users to add the settings manually. The Software points me to “/profile/user/edit”, which doesn’t actually exist, apparently.

I realize that this is an Alpha version, which is fine, since the site isn’t live yet anyway. But I’d really like to figure out why users aren’t being correctly mapped. I entered all the settings correctly to my knowledge. Except the “WordPress “secure auth” cookie salt ” setting, which I didn’t appear to have. So I left that blank.

Any help would be appreciated, so I can start working on theme work for my site. Thanks!

[John James Jacoby]

I think that the user experience ultimately should define itself as the audience grows.

I recently just witnessed a GIANT misstep on one of the larger forums I’ve been involved with. They moved from ZeroForums to vBulletin, and of the 1.2 million active members and COUNTLESS posts and topics, it managed to work pretty alright on ZeroForums. It was simple and people got used to using it the only way they could on such a large forum; they had a link to the topics you’ve posted in or are watching, and you can keep track of new posts there.

That’s it.

It was so simple but it worked so well. It let you peek your head out and scour some forums for new content if you wanted to, but it allowed you to stick inside the topics you were the most comfortable with and related the most to.

vBulletin totally removed that link, and because it handles searches differently, it’s taken 2 days so far and the search functionality still isn’t working because there is so much data to catalog.

Basically they had a forum that worked for what it’s users needed it to work as. The theme was so simple and stripped down but allowed for basic BB tags and had a good distinction between those tags. It had just the right balance of user profile customization (signature, avatar, etc) without making a social networking site.

I think what bbPress does, is it allows the administrator to decide how much of what type of emphasis can be placed on what areas of the discussion, and to add or remove those things via plug-ins without hurting the data.

I personally think that end users have no idea what they want, and regardless of what you serve them they won’t be happy. The idea is to provide them 1 option and force them to adapt to it without ever feeling like they are learning something totally from scratch.

How many times have you asked someone what they’re hungry for and they say “Oh I dunno, you?” If you said “Hey I want pizza, is that cool?” they will probably say “Sure.”

In the dinner choices of life, bbPress is a pizza crust and the plug-ins are the toppings.

[pertinax786]

Another WP integration/bbSync question: I’ve read everything written here and now have a working test blog/forum setup (2.5.1 & .902) waiting to be ported to the main site.

Bar one issue: using bbSync, I can get WP comments showing in the forum without difficulty, but replies in the forum are not porting back into the WP comments.

Am I overlooking a way of getting the forum posts to port back to the WP pages?

If this is not easily possible, might there be an alternative, like for example using Simplepie to parse the feed from the thread and re-include it back into the WP page, or even an include or Ajax load; perhaps not perfect…

I don’t need user sharing as there are no WP users; trying for an anonymous friendly integrated forum/comments system. It’s just getting those replies back onto the WP side…

[kevinjohngallagher]

Indeed JohnJames, you are right on many of your points (if not all).

I think we should do more to compliment where we’re similar to WordPress with BBpress. The code structure and website are two key issues, and i’ve mentioned a few more up above (trying not to be too boring and repeat myself).

Your points of the cross-polination ability of BBpress, by allowing topics to be tagged by multiple keywords, is 100% valid. It’s situational ofcourse, but i can see why it’s well liked.

My point was more… what do the end users think/want? If we say that we think all end users want little drilling down of categories or parent/child nodes, but instead to sift through tags that anotehr user might or might not have put on their post, then we are paramount to saying that every other piece of forum software has it wrong for the past 10 years. Thats quite massive.

I’m really glad I found BBpress, i’m glad to find such great developers and a good open community, but the more I see where we’re going the less flexible to other approaches we appear to be.

I mean, the BBpress core has a parent child hierarchy for forums, but doesn’t actually differentiate the outputted code apart form CSS. It basically treats it as a flat list. Surely, it’s clear that this hampers our theme developers. Because, lets be a little blunt here, they do all look somewhat similar.

[amagab]

I have a nice WP theme that I would like to port to my bbPress install. Will pay.

Email me:

amagab {at} gmail {period} com

[John James Jacoby]

You know, that WordPress is really an elaborate Forum clone, right?

Years ago, forums were threaded email responses back and forth that were documented hierarchically. Then, the idea of threads was cast away because it was thought to be too complicated to understand. Why would someone branch off to speak to a reply instead of replying to the original post/poster?

To me, it’s the nature of group discussion, and it is the difference between the intent of WordPress and bbPress, at least it was before WordPress 2.7 brought back threaded comments.

A forum is intended for multiple, typically registered commited users, and invokes group discussion that is often times allowed to skate off-topic as people reply to other people. Sometimes reply counts can escalate into the hundreds or thousands depending on the size of the forum.

A blog is intended to allow a few authors to create articles and attempts to cater to non-committed users that drop by, can leave a comment, and never look back if they don’t want to.

Since the emphasis of a blog is the initial post, comment replies typically tend to stay on topic.

Since the emphasis of a forum is to spark conversation, replies typically tend to drift off topic.

The funny thing is that both of these display methods use almost the exact same data storage and retrieval methods. Data is categorized and tagged as necessary, with a time-stamp, an excerpt, and other pertinent information.

The one major way that blogs differ from forums, is that forums restrict posts to one forum or category while blogs allow for one post to be in several. This ability inherently changes the emphasis away from categorization and towards the content of the post itself and how it relates to other possible posts.

I moved away from phpBB and towards WordPress for this specific attribute alone. Since posts can often times benefit from being in multiple categories, a blog style system makes a great deal of sense.

I think that the similarities between WordPress and bbPress exist only because they share a similar intent with data storage and categorization, and if you’ve ever read two books by the same author you’ll understand how both of them will read very similarly.

Overall I am happy that the authors of WordPress have made bbPress, as it shows a recognition of the distinct differences between the two of them.

I think as time passes, you will start to see more of how these two tools come from the same family but are different members all together. Think of them as fraternal twins.

[John James Jacoby]

Okay, I think I’ve experienced similar problems as most of you, and I just got mine working logging in and out from every angle with access to the admin panel on both. It still seems to hiccup a little when changing roles, so I am still trying to track that down, but I wanted to share where I am so far.

I am using the WordPress 2.7 beta 3 nightly build, and the bbPress 1.0 alpha 2. I am using various plug-ins and what-not and have akismet active on both.

My host is 1and1.com.

There are a few things that are of the utmost importance:

1. I recommend BEING LOGGED INTO WORDPRESS AS ‘admin’ with user_id of ‘1’ when you install bbPress. Any other Administrator account didn’t want to redirect to the admin panel properly. I assume the cookies will immediately conflict as they are shifted around, causing weird issues from the start.
2. BOTH -config.php files need to have the AUTH, SECURE, and LOGGED_IN KEYS defined correctly.
3. I personally also defined the SECRET_KEY in WordPress, although I’m not sure this is necessary yet.
4. bbPress needs to have the salts entered correctly during installation so that they match WordPress. Fortunately the link to the hidden admin panel is provided during the install so you can get them pretty conveniently. I personally did not have a secure_salt so I left it empty.
5. MUST add

   $bb->WP_BB = true;
   
   if (file_exists('../wp-blog-header.php'))
   
   require_once('../wp-blog-header.php');
   
   else
   
   if (file_exists('../../wp-blog-header.php'))
   
   require_once('../../wp-blog-header.php');

   or your personal equivalent to bb-config.php

6. I personally had to add

   define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', '');
   
   define('COOKIEPATH', '');

   to my wp-config.php to make it go.

7. Login to bbPress as ‘admin’ if you are already not, navigate to settings/wordpress integration, and adjust the role map accordingly.
8. Visit bb-admin/rewrite-rules.php page and copy the code
9. Put the following in a file named “.htaccess” file and place that file in the bbpress root directory:

   Options -MultiViews
   
   YOUR PREVIOUSLY COPIED CODE

   This is to make sure your URL’s are rewriting correctly.

10. Logout.
11. Clear all website cookies and attempt logging in either/or/both WordPress and bbPress. Access admin panels of both. Basically check for functionality.

That’s how I got mine working. Like I said, I’m still having issues assigning user roles for some reason, so I’ll try and figure that out next.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Ipstenu,

thanks very much for taking the time to write back. I’m glad you saw this as a discussion and not something negative towards BBpress.

Maybe i wrote it wrong, but my point is not what “we” the internet community intend BBpress to be, but more what “they” the community of end users want it to be.

BBpress in it’s current form is just a blog. users log on, post a blog, people leave comments. There’s a list of tags, blog posts (sorry “topics”), and um… thats it.

I know, and you know, and i’m sure the intelligent people that have written this lovely bit of code know, that a forum and a blog are very very similar.

When I got into the simplicity of BBpress before the summer, I tried to convince a number of my fellow web enthusiasts to take up the cause. But the more they looked at it, the more disdain they had. I’ve stuck with it, and continue to do so of course, as i thought with each release getting closer to 1.0RC we’d get there.

But we’ve not created a forum.

Forums have a different mindset to Blogs, and don’t get me wrong i’m ok with using plug-ins, it’s just that we’re fixing bugs/issues with a Blog mindset. That is, blogs list things in a singular direction. Forums, by the nature in terms of what the END USER expects, work in a cross polination way.

Yes tags are a good idea, but tags are reliant on the end user.

To give an example:

I recently had to take down BBpress from a backpacker website because the users weren’t putting in tags. The plan being that instead of UK > Scotland > Edinburgh > Travel > Topic that users could just use the UK Travel forum and tag “edinburgh” or “london” etc. Instead, we had 100s of “how do i buy cheap bus tickets” or “cheapest way to travel” or “1 ticket spare” etc with NO tags.

The site lastest 6 weeks before the owner demanded I take it down and replace it with “actual forum software” – that’s a quote from their IT department btw.

But lets give a counter example:

Wordpress.org uses BBpress and it’s working great. Loads of Topics, tags, and few forums. No real need for categories. Same with the technorati one. It’s a credit to BBPress – and nothing can take away from that and the amazing work done by the BBpress team and community… BUT… there’s always a but isn’t there… the people that use WordPress/Technorati are people like us, they are technical, they are used to tags and searching for exactly what they want. They are *not* the typical end user on the internet.

I’m all for free form Ipstenu, i totally get what you mean, and if that suits the needs of your community then great. For me, its suits the needs of some of mine, the problem is as soon as we get into the territory of what people think “all forums” should do, BBpress really starts to look… well, not like a forum.

The more we code, the more we’re coding a wordpress clone, yet not cloning their proven and successful techniques. Our website should match their website (heck, screw the colours, just in terms of layout and user flow), our methods should match their methods. I, no WE, want to help, we want BBpress to be better, but more importantly we want it to fulfil it’s mission statement; and right now that’s not quite happening.