[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.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I keep thinking back on this, and I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. I’m not speaking to the HTML/Code side of it, but the concept side. The code side, yeah, some function I would consider default is missing (Unread, maybe Allow Images)

But what’s the difference between a Forum and a Blog?

A blog is a journal. Few people make new topics, many people reply. A forum is … a forum. Many people make new topics, many people reply.

If you feel the code of a Blog is better suited to how you want to run your forum, cool. You want to use the highly structured IPB or phpBB? Have at I picked bbPress not because of the WP integration (I could care less, really) but because it gave me more options than just Category -> Forum -> Topic -> Posts, and because it’s small and lacks a lot of those fancy options.

Example? I don’t use categories at all. Don’t need ’em. I have three ‘fora’ for high level organization. I went off the same general idea I use on my Blog. Three categories, a ton of tags.

1) About the site topic (screwdriver.com is about screwdrivers, talk about them)

2) About the Website (the code behind the site, suggestions, ideas, etc)

3) Everything else (screwdrivers are nice, but I have this hammer…)

Three big, broad categories/fora whatever. The tags I sort of let explode. And even then, I’m torn between structure and free form. I want a little structure (so you don’t get tags like ‘hammer’ and ‘hammers’ which really are the same thing), but I also want freedom.

So function. If you can get all that in a blog, have at Many people do and we call ’em LiveJournal Communities

[zappoman]

Looks like my problems come from Worpresses desire to add slashes to _POST (around line 527 of wp-settings, look for add_magic_quotes())… and bbPresses desire to do the same (calls to bb_global_sanitize() around like 140ish of bb-settings.php).

I can work around this with a hack to either detecting if WP_BB is defined, is there a better way to do this?

[zappoman]

An update: I got this working by doing “complex” integration of bbPress+Wordpress and now I run bbPress mounted at /forum/ but inside of bbPress it has access to all the WP functions and so my theme is able to run wp plugins, widgets, etc.

I wrote a plugin (that happens to live in wp, but really it’s all the same now).. that hooks ‘bb_template’, ‘bb_get_forum_bread_crumb’, ‘get_forums’, ‘bb_index.php_pre_db’, ‘bb_forum.php_pre_db’, and a couple others.

My plugin alows you to specify with “sub forum” is associated with a blog, and when you go to the forum page for that blog, it shows a fully functioning bbPress for that forum and below. It’s actually running bbPress, and this plugin, with access to the wordpress themes, widgets, etc.

What’s cool about this is that my main bbPress site, which includes all of the forums, including these blog forums, shows all the forum content as well.

[zappoman]

I’ve done some searching and not found anything related to this, so I appologize if someone elses google-fu is stronger than me.

I could use some help on this problem.

I have installed “complex” integration between bbPress (0.9) and WPMU (2.6) — yes, I have authentication working because I have custom auth plugins… that’s not my issue.

The problem I am running into is that IF I include wordpress then I’m getting extra attribute escapes on new posts and edit posts in bbPress.

So if I post a topic with a title of “test” it will end up posting as “test” if I’m just running bbPress (that’s good), but if I have wordpress loaded at the same time, I get \”test\”. And the resulting post displays in the forums.

Has anyone else ever seen this before?

[kevinjohngallagher]

So, the issue with the method implemented in : https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/hiding-subforums-subforums-from-subforum-pages

is that it only checks for the lineage of the forum before it.

This causes problems when you have multiple children to multiple children, as thus:

category

– Forum1

– – Child 1

– – – Child1’s child

– – Child 2

That method will make BBpress think that Child 2 is actually under Child1’s Child, because when testing if their parents are the same they clearly are not.

Instead, we have to create a nesting code that counts the depth to which we go as we trawl through each parent/child relationship – which is daft as there is a walker->depth function that we just don’t have access to via $GLOBALS.

EDIT:

Update – not knowing if it’s the last forum in a category is starting to kill me a little.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Funnily enough i’ve made the same hack solution as instructed in this topic: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/hiding-subforums-subforums-from-subforum-pages

The problem is, the idea of checking for the forum parent id is ok when dealing with a singular table. If it’s got the same parent fine, if it’s not do something else. But the whole thing starts to get messy when dealing with non-linear tables. If your forum has multiple sub forums or parent child relationships the whole thing starts to crumble, or if you’re using a javascript DOM indexer 9say you want open close functionality), or if you’re aiming for a a UL/LI version instead of tables (i’m not against tables for tabular data btw – but for parent child iterations screen readers prefer UL/LI loops).

I’ll post my theme with these hacks and hopefully you can see what I mean, because i’m a bit stunned about how rigid this all is given the excellent coding that’s been developed by the authors so far.

[fontadoni]

Hello there.

I recently converted my phpbb 2.x forum to bbpress. I did this successfully with the provided script by iteisa.com (phpBB2bbpress). I was lucky that I had not upgraded to phpbb 3, so I followed the instructions carefully as I read lots of people having issues with the conversion while using higher versions of phpbb. I first installed bbpress 0.7, I ran the script, and when the database conversion was done sucesfully, I upgraded to bbpress: 0.9.0.2. This was a couple of days ago and I’m very happy with the results.

Now, for my actual question. I had a pretty small board with about 100 members and as I mentioned, the conversion was pretty successful, the only weird thing I’m noticing is that ID numbers for new members are way off. Let me give you an example. One of the last members to register before the conversion has an ID number of 107 (or profile.php?id=107). New members are now getting very high ID numbers, the last member that registered has an ID number of 1000000003 (profile.php?id=1000000003).

Is this something I should worry about? Can you guys give me a few pointers on how I could change this in the database? I would like to fix it.

Sorry for the long post and I thank you in advance for your time!

[kevinjohngallagher]

At the risk of looking like a double whammy in regards to the non nesting iterations of our outputted code, just using TRs with different classes, i’ve hit across another wee issue – but this time i’m sure there’s a simple solution I just can’t see the relavent code.

I want to be able to know if a forum has children or not, or more specifically when we move up or down a level in the “xPath” iteration.

I’m using a method of using $GLOBALS->forum_parent but what this currently requires me doing is testing to see if the forum has a parent that is not a category, then checking to see if the parent is the same as the previous forums parent, and then output relavent code to nest the forum in an actual parent child format:

Category

– Forum

– Forum

– – Forum

– – Forum

– Forum

This obviously creates havok and rather messy code for the closing of the nestings.

I realise that for small websites this will look like a formatting issue, but once you reach more than 2 levels in a parent child relationship, the ability to control nested relationships makes a huge difference.

Thanks for the help folks

EDIT:

Ok, i think i’ve found half the solution to the issue, and maybe i can phrase the question better now in BBterms…

I want to know, via PHP, before any code has been sent to the browser for the forum, if it is a FIRST CHILD or a LAST CHILD.

Now obviously, BBpress knows this because it’s outputting bb-last-child bb-first-child css, but how can I access these settings on the front-page.php ?

Thanks alot for all the help

[artgra]

have followed instructions and uploaded all files into my hosting account and triple checked everything is as it should be. Typed URL – http://fifolife.com/bbPress which is what I’m supposed to do (right?) and I get a message saying that (admin.php) is not listed on ‘line 1’.

As I’ve stated, I’ve triple checked that I uploaded correctly and it’s all exactly as the files should be. What’s going wrong?

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi BBpress team,

I wanted to raise a concern I’ve had for sometime, but every time I think it’s the right thing to do, there’s a new release and I thought that maybe it’d be fixed. With 1.0 in alpha stage, I figure now’s a good time.

I think we’ve got a lot of this wrong.

Not the code, not the plugins, not the community, but more the mindset behind the important features. We’ve not built forum software, we’ve built blogging software.

We make posts, and people comment on them. The focus of BBpress is on individual posts with things like tags, as opposed to the forum/section/category to which it was posted. I also appreciate the desire to streamline the code base, which is wonderful, but users and the internet-public at large expect forums to have certain features – to rely on user updated plugins for these features is not an ideal solution.

I don’t say any of this to criticise, because you folks have done amazing work given the small team and smaller community working on BBpress, and I’m massively impressed; but I think given the scale of the project you’re working on you’d want real feedback.

Let me give an example if I may, which might illustrate the issue I and other users face.

In the 1.0alpha, we finally get Categories as standard, a feature that is absolutely essential for a forum (not a blog), otherwise the ‘forums’ are just a list of wordpress categories.

The problem with Categories, is that we don’t have ‘forums’ belonging to them, instead we have ‘forums’ that are called categories. A simple 1/0 in a db. But it’s not enough. Why?

Well it means that the loop in front-page.php to iterate through forums has to check to see if it’s a category. There is no independent check for categories and forums. This of course makes no difference in the world of all forums being in a singular table (the category can just be an individual TR and we can use a PHP continue to end the loop), but as soon as we move to multiple tables (which is essential for accessibility focussed websites), or nested divs this becomes quite useless.

What we need its:

Category

Forum

Topic

Forum

Topic

Topic

Reply

Reply

Each belonging to the parent above it. But we don’t have that in BBpress for categories. It’s massively short-sighted.

Now, this may seem like a simple thing, but I raise it as more of a mindset. We’re coming across a bug/issue/problem/feature request and we’re solving that specific request rather than seeing how it fits in. Take, if I may, the brilliant UNREAD POSTS plug-in by _CK_. When it was built it added a class to the specific span of the name of the topic post in the list of topics. Upon request it then did the same to the name of the forums. At no time was the thought process – wait a minute, if I put this at the top level item of the iteration that means that all child nodes can use it. _CK_ fixed this oversight yesterday and his plugin is now brilliant and easily rivalling the methodology used in the bigger forum solutions.

But it’s the mindset behind it I think we need to change. Fixing a singular problem, or even adding a new requested feature, without planning how it will impact others or if it’s at a high enough level is starting to make BBpress look amateurish.

I’m not saying we have to emulate the big boys and their massively bloated software, but what we have to accept, as a community, is that the likes of PHPbb and IPB etc. all do certain functions as standard, and these are what our users will expect.

I can’t see a roadmap or feature list for a finished 1.0 anywhere, I can’t even see a feature list for 1.5 anywhere (and yes I’ve been to the TRAC site for both). I just get the feeling as we move towards 1.0 release, that we’re not really releasing forum software, we’re releasing blogging software:

WordPress: categories > posts > comments

BBpress: forums > topics > replies

These are effectively one and the same. I’m quiety confident that someone could write a WP theme that effectively does what BBpress does. The BBpress front page list topics then forums (with the number of topics /posts in it). A WP page could list blog Posts titles and then categories (with the number of posts / comments in it). They are, to an end user, the one and the same.

I mean, was XML-RPC absolutely essential for BBpress? It seems to me that Categories, or the Unread Posts feature would be far more essential in that other forums have them. Why haven’t we used the same folder structure as WordPress so that we can easily convince wordpress users to also use BB? Heck why isn’t even our website set out in the same way (this may bring over some WP plugin creators)?

These things are not complains, and I do not raise them to flame or criticise in anyway, I merely hope to kick start a little discussion that can see us move BBpress forward. To often in the past few months I’ve suggested BBpress to friends or fellow developers and they’ve told me that it just doesn’t meet their needs – I think that’s something we need to fix, together

Kev

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Vuuch,

You copy the contents of the “bbpress” folder into your “forum” folder. Basically, click through your ZIP file and all the subsequent folders until you see files (not just a folder). Copy everything at that level to your forums folder.

Good Luck

[vuuch]

I want to ask before a create a bigger problem. I have not installed anything yet. I have downloded the install and extracted it on my machine. I read the installation docs and it says copy the extracted files to my forum location. I AM NOT SURE WHAT TO COPY??? in my folder with the zip file i have a folder bbpress 0.9.0.2, in that folder there is another folder bbpress and in that folder there are files and folders. So if I plan to have the forum at mysite.com/forum then do i copy the folder bbpress 0.9.0.2 and it’s subs or do i copy the content of bbpress to my forum folder?

thanks, sorry for such a minor question

[mithrandir321]

Hello, I have this code (which comes from another support thread here) on my front-page.php:

<table id=”highest”>

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

<?php foreach ( $top_topics as $topic ) : ?> // line 70

<tr<?php topic_class(); ?>>

<td>“><?php topic_title(); ?>

</td>

<td class=”num”><div class=”rating-holder”><?php bb_rating();?>

<span class=”count”><?php bb_rating_count(); ?>

</span>

</div>

</td></tr>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</table>

And under it the code for latest topics.

It gives me this error:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/home1/novapojistovna_cz/public_html/www/bbpress/bb-templates/kakumei/front-page.php on line 70

Can anybody help, please. Don’t quite understand what is wrong

Thanks

[Tom Lynch]

It works great but the thing is that I still cannot get cookie integration right.

[learningcomputer]

Wow, problem fixed, thanks chris.

[chrishajer]

No, it does not work like WordPress. There is nothing like a widget in bbPress. If you want to add adsense to your forum, you might want to read some of these posts:

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

[learningcomputer]

i have difficulty inserting adsense on my bbpress installation the wordpress is installed in http://learningcomputer.info. The bbpress is in http://forum.learningcomputer.info. Can’t I insert it automatically just like regular wordpress? i mean using widget in the Design page?

Thanx for u’r attention

[Ed Torres]

In my case I tried to install this version using my laptop, under Firefox web browser and could not login or sometimes even finish the installation due to cookies problems.

I check Tools>Options>Privacy>Show Cookies… and my site was not there.

I then tried to add the site manually and the problem did not solved.

I deleted the /forum/ folder and the bb_ tables from the MySQL database and uploaded the bbForum again. This time I used my desktop and checked the cookies first. My site’s cookies were registered and the installation went smooth and the forum is operational.

Hopefully this would help somebody.

[chrishajer]

Yes, you can make a modification to that file to work around the disabled function.

getmypid() – often disabled on shared hosting systems

Line 43 of bb-includes/class-phpass.php needs to be edited to get around this function being disabled on your host.