[kevinjohngallagher]

I know what you’re thinking, that it probably *should* be mentioned either here:

https://bbpress.org/documentation/integration-with-wordpress/

or

https://bbpress.org/download/

but it’s not

BBpress, great software, also useful for testing your abilities to mind read!

[kevinjohngallagher]

“Oh one big thing I should point out – the features in bbPress, and the time of the main developers are first and primarily geared towards the need of Automattic and WordPress.org – people forget or don’t realize that.”

We don’t get or realize that because… it’s not written anywhere.

We’re not mind readers.

“The features that are “missing” from bbPress just happen to be the features that Matt decided weren’t a priority for WordPress.org and the other Automattic forums.”

Oh. See, now that’s a totally different light on the subject. I didn’t realise i was building something for Matt to fit Matt’s needs and for the needs of Matt’s companies. Maybe that should be written down somewhere too…

“It’s also why there is no documentation, remember Matt has to pay the coders, why does he need documentation for 3rd party plugin developers if it’s just going to cost money.”

I do understand that, but surely the actual developers have some form of documentation too. Couldn’t we all see that to make ‘Matts’ product better? And it’s not like Automatic is short of a few bob.

Surely, from a business point of view, having documentation to increase the number of theme and plugin developers will increase the take-up rate of BBpress.

“bbPress 1.0 and the backpress integration are now being driven by Matt’s goal of TalkPress for WordPress.com members.”

So, what this means is that we can’t, as a community, do anything about anything, because we’re all following Matt’s plan, to which we have no feature list or roadmap or really any visibility of?

I dont expect Matt, or really any WordPress/Automatic employee, to have to run things by anyone in the community – i’m not saying that I do. But the… pretence that this is an open source project is totally nullified if we’re all coding against a grand plan and road map we’re not allowed to see.

If the new standard answer is going to be “that’s not on Matt’s wishlist but we’re not going to tell you what is on it – go on GUESS” then can start to see why so many people have left the BBpress community, and why all the themes/forums we’re seeing all look the same.

[John Doe]

Glad to help musnake!

Thanks for the heads up with the custom WP login

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Psst! You mean to put bbpress here:

/home/www/example.com/bbpress

If you put it under wordpress, your URL will be http://www.example.com/wordpress/bbpress

[_ck_]

Oh one big thing I should point out – the features in bbPress, and the time of the main developers are first and primarily geared towards the need of Automattic and WordPress.org – people forget or don’t realize that.

Remember, bbPress is a purpose driven product that happens to also be open source. It wasn’t just a few people that said “hey let’s make a better free forum because we can”.

The features that are “missing” from bbPress just happen to be the features that Matt decided weren’t a priority for WordPress.org and the other Automattic forums. It’s also why there is no documentation, remember Matt has to pay the coders, why does he need documentation for 3rd party plugin developers if it’s just going to cost money.

bbPress 1.0 and the backpress integration are now being driven by Matt’s goal of TalkPress for WordPress.com members.

So there’s the logic that some might not understand without perspective. There are projects like SMF that literally WERE “let’s make a better free forum” that have matured now so you can compare to them – but remember they are half a decade old. bbPress is far younger (and bbPress is way easier to write mods for).

[_ck_]

SteveDrum both anon posting and PM are plugins.

I don’t see why they should be built in, I for one don’t like them on my forums and it bloats the code.

Until 1.0 there was a problem with anon posting because there was no place to store post meta, but now the general bb_meta table can be used. So maybe one day it will have it built in but not likely 1.0

[suzkaw]

Thanks for the comments guys.

@__ck__ when you say views are talking about the forum list? Also good idea about the search. I just couldn’t figure out a good place for the register login section.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Just seen Sam pop up on these boards (was beginning to think he was a myth), so hopefully we’ll get an answer on some of these points we’ve made

[_ck_]

forum_description has an optional “before” argument

try forum_description('');

[_ck_]

cocotrp, you can exclude IDs by modifying the mysql queries and changing

WHERE user_status = 0

to

WHERE user_status = 0 AND user_id NOT IN (1,2,3,4)

1,2,3,4 are the user_id’s you don’t want to be displayed.

[_ck_]

Very nice! Perhaps one of the top 3 themes so far IMHO.

Alternate demo on bbShowcase:

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/?bbtheme=inove

I would maybe move Views under Hot Tags and therefore make the views list visible all the time too. Also a small search box in the nav bar instead of the word “search” (or next to it) would be useful. I notice your site has a nice search box, also the RSS link on your site is nice too

I’m definitely making a 960px theme next year for my site, you’ve proven how good/useful it looks.

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

All fixed. This post by deadmedic fixed all my issues! It explains why all the ‘worked for me!’ posts seemed like nonsense to me.

The fix:

Change line 673 in bb-settings.php from:

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

to:

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

Thank you deadmedic!

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

while ($stars_in_heavens) {

deadmedic.karma += extra_scoop_of_icecream();

deadmedic.praise_sung += 1;

}

You fixed it.

Here I was searching for all instances of setcookie…novice error!

WP2.6.3; bbPress 1.0a2; PHP5; Apache 1.3

I can log in and out of WP and bbPress from any direction!

I did not use the .htaccess edits, just the rtrim line.

Thank you, so very much!

I wonder if this is going to solve my bbSynch and bbLive issues?

BTW, there is a WP plugin to skin the wp login. They have a flickr group to share what people have done.

I like the idea of funneling registrations through bbPress, as most of my members will hit the fora.

I have to go and clean up some nasty things I’ve been saying around the web about integration…

Thanks again, man.

Cheers.

[puleddu]

Is possible to remove the emdash from the forum description?

The function that generate the description: forum_description()

How can I obtain this?

Thank you in advance!

[johnhiler]

I have a site with two separate bbPress installs that share a single users table: one is a Message Boards forum, while the other one is for Classifieds. They are on two separate subdomains:

* boards.weddingbee.com

* classifieds.weddingbee.com

Some users post classifieds listings to the Boards, which creates tons of admin work: I have to mark the listing as spam, message the user and ask them to repost it to Classifieds. It’s a big pain, and the problem is only growing.

After doing this several hundred times, I finally realized that maybe there was a better solution . It’d be great if I could click a button and have the topic be deleted from the Boards server and added to Classifieds.

Is it possible to have a plugin “cross over” and send data to another bbPress install? In this case, both the Boards and the Classifieds bbPress installs are on the same physical server… maybe that helps here? Or maybe that doesn’t matter, and this can all be done through API’s or something…

Any insight on this one? Thanks!

[chrishajer]

Put it in your root, but in a folder of its own. So, if you have WordPress here

/home/www/example.com/wordpress/

you can put bbPress here:

/home/www/example.com/wordpress/bbpress/

Then, your website/blog is http://www.example.com and your forum is http://www.example.com/bbpress/

You can call your folder whatever you want, it might be forum, forums, bbpress, anything at all.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

At a guess…

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the majority of the links, I think. At least the ones off the main page of a forum.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Hey, my site works fine. I’m saying bbpress.org’s quotes are broke. Someone should fix the CSS here.

[chrishajer]

The blockquotes are there in the source, but there is no corresponding CSS. This was brought up before here, but not addressed. If you are working on your own theme, just define blockquote in the style.css however you like, for example:

blockquote {

padding: 0 0 0 20px;

background-color: red;

}

[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.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi _CK_,

Once again thanks for a great technical answer.

Can i follow it up with a quickie though:

Where in the documentation is all of those methods listed?

Are there other things i can call from $bb_forums_loop that may help is theme developers?

Where is the documentation for them?

P.S. your answer really helped me alot, i’ll rewrite by current code now

[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.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

It seems blockquotes are broken on this board.

<blockquote>Test</blockquote>

gives:

Test