[Jimi Wikman]

@robin-w I will happily assist with graphic design, UX and frontend code when time permits. Not sure what you need though, but I could start with making some design suggestion for BBPress itself and something about the documentation to make it more accessible?

I also have some suggestions for the website itself if that would be of interest, but I need to understand more about the BG’s you have first and also familiarize myself better with both the websites structure and the WordPress “way” before I want to attempt that. No need to make a flashy design if it does not improve anything or goes against the standard process. Worse yet if it does not focus on your business goals and make a mess of things 🙂

@netweb I look forward to your arrival on Github. I think it’s a nice move 🙂

I am all for communication between developers, in fact I would say its a requirement for managing a development project like this with developers all over the world. I would not use IRC though, I would use something like HipChat (especially integrated in Jira and confluence so I get SVN information, ticket escalation and new documentation notices among other things). HipChat is free and it’s extendable with WordPress, Twitter, Github and more.

[Stephen Edgar]

Speaking of IRC #bbPress on Freenode 😉 Details here: https://codex.bbpress.org/participate-and-contribute/, that said I see where you are coming from though I am one who thinks this is a good thing, being able to ‘chat’ with developers is a very good thing, everything is logged for openness and transparency and everything is backed by tickets and tracing in Trac.

Onto participation, bbPress will has a presence on GitHub https://github.com/bbpress and very shortly we will have our code base synchronized there and how we utilize GitHub for participation will be no doubt an evolving thing, first we’ll get the code sync’d and then look to see how that goes and go from there.

[Jimi Wikman]

Of what I have seen BBPress is a tight ship when it comes to code quality and extensibility, so I have no doubt that the code is outstanding in every way. That is also one of the reasons I think it’s a shame not more people are using BBPress.

I understand the reasons behind using Trac and trust me I have been in the same situation many times 🙂 I do think it’s important not to accept a standard because its a standard, especially not one that could be improved upon. I know that it’s difficult to push for a change in WordPress, but if the tools don’t improve the workflow and encourage participation, then it should be replaced in my opinion.

Still, it’s not my call but I know some very skilled people that are discouraged from helping out with WordPress because of the lacking tools and the feeling of being back on early 2000 when they see meetings taking place on IRC 🙂

[Jimi Wikman]

@netweb I appreciate the long list of answers and I like what you post 🙂

For the warning system you can see it in action on IPB and it’s basically a system that allow for moderators to issue a warning for bad behavior. This can be accompanied by a temporary ban, forced into moderation or an outright permanent ban.

User warning system allows custom sanctions

When troublesome users make themselves a nuicance, IP.Board provides a range of tools to help staff deal with the situation. The user warning system enables sanctions to be issued, ranging from a simple message sent to the user, right up to an outright permanent ban. Other options include a temporary suspension, or putting the user in the moderation queue, requiring all of their topics & posts to be approved by staff before they’re shown.

—

Is it really so difficult to make it so BBPress create pages for all areas of the forum? Rather than using a template each area have its own page and can take advantage of all the features of a page? That way it would never be a problem to setup pages to be full width, what sidebars to add on the forum index or inside a forum, or even a thread?

I am not familiar with the code, but if such a thing could be done, then that problem would no longer exist?

—
Custom fields should not be something you ask the users to go inet functions.php to fix, that is way to complicated for the majority of the users 🙂

—

Post and topic indicators, have you talked to other forum developers like IPB and VBulletin about how they have solved this? I mean IPB have forums with tens of million topics and tens of thousands of users that are all working well even with this turned on?

[Stephen Edgar]

Breadcrumbs are now implemented in the docs, both breadcrumbs and in page navigation, this will be added to all the docs as each is updated 😉

e.g. https://codex.bbpress.org/participate-and-contribute/

From a technical perspective bbPress is highly admired and often receives kudo’s for the actual code documentation so we are part way there. 🙂

I haven’t used many systems but Trac did indeed take a while to wrap my head around.

One of the benefits of being a ‘sister project’ of WordPress is we follow and adhere to many of the same principles as WordPress in both code and the tools we use so much of what is listed in the WordPress Core handbook is identical to bbPress so resources such as there handbook are also relevant to bbPress, we just need to link and/or copy/paste this content for our own purposes.
https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/

[Stephen Edgar]

There’s some nice feedback up there, thanks 🙂

.WYSIWYG for input field. I know there is a plugin for it, but it should be in core and you should have the option to turn on and off in admin.

With the new TinyMCE added in WordPress 3.9 and further improvements coming in WordPress 4.0 I am keeping an eye on this and due to several incompatibilities we had when we previously had this as a bbPress option there is a bit of work to be done here to not make it a crappy experience if we do add it back as a bbPress option.

.Organisation for forums. Forum grouping has been a standard since 1999.

Yes 😉

.Topic and forum indicators for new topics. Finding new topics should be at a glance.

There are a couple of plugins that do this, you can see the list here https://codex.bbpress.org/feature-plugins-tracking/. One of the issues with this feature is for larger sites is WordPress’ database performance and is one of the reasons we haven’t gone down this road yet, once a plugin can do this without crippling larger sites we would definately take a closer look.

.Moderation should be available for all forums individually and on a board basis.

This will be in bbPress 2.6 https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/459

.Permission masks per usergroup to control who can read, reply and post in different forums.

Once the previous ‘Forum Moderation’ is shipped as part of bbPress 2.6 we can look to extend that functionality further to encompass this.

.Content approval for new posts and to take individual posts offline for review.

This is also coming in bbPress 2.6, see https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2645

.Warning system for handling member mayhem.

Not sure what this would entail, I get what your saying, I suppose the current way to do things is block/ban the user though you are suggesting there should be a way to handle/have some way/form of communicating with said user. (See private messages below)

.Report center where moderators and admins can handle reported threads/posts/members.

This is mostly also handled as part of https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2645

.Private messages should not require Buddypress. It should be in BBPress.

I’m not 100% sold on this idea that bbPress should include this, with that said though, as per above a way to ‘communicate’ in some form either with the moderators (or in this use case other users) I have an idea for this, how exactly it would implemented I’m not sure of just yet but the idea is there, just need to get some time to give it a try and see what happens 😉

.Custom Profile Fields should not requires Buddypress…

Custom profile fields do not require BuddyPress, bbPress 100% fully supports custom profile fields as part of WordPress ‘Custom Profile Fields’.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/user_contactmethods
https://gist.github.com/ntwb/c70caf5a0aa9d3062a6d

.Notifications should not require Buddypress…

I think I am with you here…

.Buttons to take actions at the top of the thread and post is also standard since 2003.

The following ticket covers half of this, firstly for accessibility issue, most likely this will extend to include links.

.Out of the box functionality so there is no need to create additional pages like bbpress.php to actually make things look the way you are.

This is near impossible, with the ~2,000+ themes in WordPress’ theme repo we cannot support this many themes yet alone when we start counting the number of commercial themes available. We do our best to have template compatibility with as many themes as we can and think we work ‘out of the box’ on more themes than we don’t.

[Robin W]

Jimi,

Nice to have you aboard, and I hope that you’ll help in improving bbpress. More UX help is welcome.

I think bbpress users split into two groups.

1. The users that just want a simple forum as part of their web.

Those that visit the support forum usually only need a couple of changes. this is the vast majority of bbPress users

Biggest issues for these are

getting it working with their theme – usually because the theme has a highly complex page.php, and these users are not code savvy, and many don’t know FTP
registration and logging on – really a wordpress issue, but it’s the first time they come across needing to do this, as before they were the only user
Adding simple features – since each one varies these can only ever be bespoke, and again since these people are not code savvy you need to show them child themes and functions files first

2. Users who typically want bbpress to look like someone else’s feature rich forum

They want all the features, look and functionality of another bb, but on wordpress. Some then complain on the forum that they don’t like the software, and why doesn’t it look exactly like xx, which is much better, much easier and has better documentation. Which kinda grates, and surely it would be better to complain to xx’s forum as to why they don’t make a version of their fantastic software to work on wordpress, rather than complain that bbpress’s software doesn’t look like theirs. This to me is a bit like complaining to Ford that their cars don’t look like Nissan.

The issue here is that bbpress is just a plugin, written by some guys to do forumy stuff. Like all software it could be better, the docs can always be better, but the philosophy of the somewhere is to keep it light.

So I s’pose the challenge is to help improve it so that it can work for both camps. So I really do hope you stay and add expertise, maybe go into the codex and improve the documentation – anyone can, but most don’t !

[Stephen Edgar]

I agree with and echo Robin’s sentiments above.

The plan is to update, including breaking up many of the current docs to separate sections based more along the lines of a “Table of Contents” similar to how BuddyPress have done in recent months.

You can see BuddyPress’ planned “Table of Contents” linked from https://codex.buddypress.org/ on Google Docs here.

So the plan will be for bbPress to go down a similar road as BuddyPress and WordPress with their upcoming handbooks (e.g. plugins, themes).

Again this is all a time thing and as always, contributions are always most welcome 🙂

[Robin W]

I sense that there are more developers than UX people around here, am I right?

I suspect you are. There are probably less than a dozen ‘helpers’ who come on here to help others, and probably only 1/2 dozen regulars. I am not a bbPress developer, but have written several plugins for it, and enjoy the challenge of answering others’ Q’s.

Most bbpress users want it as a tool, so only visit the site when they have an issue or want it to do something. Once fixed they are happy and don’t revisit, and are highly unlikely to contribute to improving documentation.

The codex is a community project, and anyone can go in and help improve it. Amongst many others I have tried to make it more UX (user experience – I had to look it up !), but I have limited time, and lots of other commitments.

If you could outline a more useful structure I’d be all for it.

[Robkk]

Any luck finding out how this reply feature is accomplished?

@marximusmg i havent really dug into it ive been busy

but heres is the show lead topic function , throw that code into your child themes functions.php

bbp_show_lead_topic

im sure all you got to do is add the call for the reply form code somewhere right at the bottom in the lead topic template.

I also would love to know how to (also seen on High Existence) implement the “reply” option on the top right of each post within the topic, which when clicked accordions out the reply form directly beneath that post.

they use threaded replies, so if you go to bbpress forum settings then click threaded replies you should get that.

[Jimi Wikman]

It’s because you still have the sidebar column in the code.
You can try to chase it down or just hide it with CSS. @aussiestar14 you can fix your forum by doing this:

add a class to .content-wrap and set the width to 100% (I think if you do it directly on .content-wrap it will mess upp other pages?). Then create a class named .bbpress #sidebar-subsidiary and set display:none in it.

That way you hide the sidebar column and make the content stretch 100%

Hope that helps.

[Robkk]

i know this is possible there is some function to display usermeta

webpage: there is a website field in contact details in bbpress profile , that i think it gets that from wordpress profile information and just displays it frontend.

about me: there is Biographical Info under About Yourself so its possible to call it using a display usermeta function i think.

send me an email: you can make a link with php inside of it so it would end up with mailto:(user-email), i dont know for sure if thats a safe way to do it though.

and you just put all that code and display on the frontend where the forum role and user stats are.

[cbesett]

I’ve searched and seen others with similar problems but I’m still not sure why this happens or how to remedy.

1. I created a new page and added the Forum list shortcode. This works fine.
2. When you click into a forum it adds the “forums” as part of the breadcrumb. This links back to /forums.
3. When i go into settings and try to put the slug of my page from #1 that page no longer works.
4. if instead i create a page called “Forums” and put the shortcode in — that does not work.
5. yes, it’s fine if you just don’t click on the breadcrumb but that isn’t good

[watstyl08]

I just used this code, to no avail. It causes an error on the site – check it out.

<?php 

get_header(); // Loads the header.php template. ?>
 
	<?php if ( is_bbpress() ) { ?>
 
		<header class="entry-header">
			<h1 class="entry-title"><?php single_post_title(); ?></h1>
			<?php echo apply_atomic_shortcode( 'entry_byline', '<div class="entry-byline">' . __( 'Published by [entry-author] on [entry-published] [entry-comments-link before=" | "] [entry-edit-link before=" | "]', 'spine2' ) . '</div>' ); ?>
		</header><!-- .entry-header -->
 
		<?php while( have_posts() ): the_post(); ?>
 
			<?php the_content(); ?>
 
		<?php endwhile; ?>
 
 
		<footer class="entry-footer">
			<?php echo apply_atomic_shortcode( 'entry_meta', '<div class="entry-meta">' . __( '[entry-terms before="Posted in " taxonomy="category"] [entry-terms before="| Tagged "]', 'spine2' ) . '</div>' ); ?>
		</footer><!-- .entry-footer -->
 
	<?php } else { ?>
	<div id="content" class="hfeed">
 
		<?php get_template_part( 'loop-meta' ); // Loads the loop-meta.php template. ?>
 
		<?php get_template_part( 'loop' ); // Loads the loop.php template. ?>
 
		<?php get_template_part( 'loop-nav' ); // Loads the loop-nav.php template. ?>
 
	</div><!-- #content -->
 
<?php get_footer(); // Loads the footer.php template. ?>

[Robin W]

@watstyl08

What I meant was change it, and then I can use some tools to inspect it and try to help give uyou the code to resolve. Unless I can see ‘full-width’ not being ‘full-width’ I can’t help !

[Robin W]

ok, did you filter to that code, or just replace it in the core?

[Robin W]

Thanks for posting the result 🙂 I’ve note the code location in case this comes up again !

[watstyl08]

@robin W @aussiestar14

The proposed code changes didn’t work, so I was forced to go back to the three column approach.

I still really want to move to full-width, but so far no solution has worked.

[kopperwoman]

I’m having a similar problem to dustinarmstrong. But its not exactly the same.

I’m trying to fix a broken forum set up for a client. I did not do the forum installation (he did it himself) AND the forum is installed on a live site that gets lots of web traffic so I don’t want to do anything that might impact the website overall.

Here’s my situation:
1) BBPress was installed (I don’t have details about when and how),
2) a page was created with the [bbp-forum-index] shortcode on it
3) the forum didn’t work, so my client contacted me to fix it
4) I went into settings > forums and changed the forum root slug from the default “forum” to “travel-forums” (the name of the page where the shortcode lives. The error message “Possible bbPress conflict: Forum slug” showed up next to the slug field after saving the settings.
5) I also changed the single forum slug from the default “forum” to “travel-forums”. The error message “Possible bbPress conflict: Forums base” showed up next to the slug field after saving.

In my case, the forum page DOES show up at http://foobar.com/travel-forums but it is empty except for the welcome text that I had entered into the forum main window. (So it just says “Welcome to our forum” without any of the discussion topics showing up.

Also, I have the “Recent Topics” widget enabled on my sidebar and my three test discussion topics DO show up there. When I click on any of them they take me to the correct URL but the pages are blank. So, for example, when I click on “test topic” in the widget I land on http://foobar.com/travel-forums/topic/test-topic/ and the page displays the topic header “Test topic” and the topic question “what do you think about travel?” but it doesn’t display any of the posts.

I’m not sure if this behavior is related to the slug conflict error messages or if something else is wrong.

I’m trying to follow the advice that Stephen Edgar gave.

First up, I think this is probably true in my case:

most likely you have something else either titled or using the slug discuss and this includes any items in trash as even though they are in the trash they still reserve that slug and it is not released until the item is removed from the trash.

This is probably a stupid question but How do I empty the trash to make sure that the old slug is removed?

Second, I’d like to try this:

To fix this try resetting your permalinks. In your WordPress Administration Screens navigate to Settings > Permalinks, select a different permalink structure and save. Then select your preferred permalink structure and save again.

but since my website is live and has been for a long time (and has lots of blog posts using the custom structure already) I’m concerned that this could permanently break the existing links. Any thoughts on this?

[cybarmitzvah]

#2 I have noticed a new problem on the forum, astronomertalk.com,

you need to join to see it, but I changed the submit button,

using this code:

#bbpress-forums .submit {
background-color: #000073;
color: #FFFFFF;
float: center;
vertical-align: middle;
border-radius: 2px;
height: 35px;
width: 80px;
font-size: 18px;
}

but it also influenced the update profile button which now looks screwed up…

You need to join to see it, but it looks bad.

Does anyone know a fix?

Best,
JB

[MilliR]

I am using forums.php as my custom template to modify bbpress. I copied content of archive-forum into it and modified it a bit. Thing is, the forum lists shows up as expected. But no topic or list of topics is shown on following the links. This is all I get.

Oh bother! No forums were found here!

Using the default page.php gives no problem.

Here’s the code for forums.php

<?php

/**
 * bbPress - Forum Archive
 *
 * @package bbPress
 * @subpackage Theme
 */

get_header(); ?>
<div id="main-content">
	<div id="millir-header-feat">
		<div class="container">
			<h1 class="entry-title"><?php bbp_forum_archive_title(); ?></h1>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="container">
	<div id="content-area" class="clearfix">
		<div id="left-area">
			<?php do_action( 'bbp_before_main_content' ); ?>

			<?php do_action( 'bbp_template_notices' ); ?>

			<div id="forum-front" class="bbp-forum-front">				
				<div class="entry-content">

					<?php bbp_get_template_part( 'content', 'archive-forum' ); ?>

				</div>
			</div><!-- #forum-front -->

			<?php do_action( 'bbp_after_main_content' ); ?>
		</div>
		<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
	</div>
	</div>	
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

[Stephen Edgar]

Can I bring with me the anonymous posts from deleted and anonymous users?

I have just added support for this to a handful of bbPress’ importers, I hope to finalize some bits for compatibility with all of bbPress importers by the end of the week and release the code for people to test out. 🙂

Importing Avatars

This is kind of a complex issue because of PHP timeouts, if we can’t find an avatar via ftp/http how long do we wait, what if the remote avatar no longer exists.

@cybmeta Has written a Joomla Kunena Forum Attachments converter for the GD bbPress Attachments plugin.

I’d like to play around one day when I have some time up my sleeve to base an avatar and attachment importer that we could use as a separate plugin to import these into WordPress media library for use with bbPress.

https://github.com/CybMeta/kunena-attachments-to-bbpress

Kunena converter for bbPress 2.4

Kunena converter for bbPress 2.4

[Nicolas Korobochkin]

In file bbpress.php I find this code:

// Topic-View Pagination|Feed|View
add_rewrite_rule( $view_slug . $paged_rule, 'index.php?' . $view_id . '=$matches[1]&' . $paged_id . '=$matches[2]', $priority );

add_rewrite_rule( $view_slug . $feed_rule,  'index.php?' . $view_id . '=$matches[1]&' . $feed_id  . '=$matches[2]', $priority );

add_rewrite_rule( $view_slug . $root_rule,  'index.php?' . $view_id . '=$matches[1]',                               $priority );

What is it? What is feed? /forums/view/feed not open.

[Stephen Edgar]

Yes, all of what you state above will be a factor and it simply comes down to resource management, allocate a ton of RAM for MySQL, put each database on separate hard disk drives, make these SSD’s if you can, if you have some serious RAM available put the MySQL databases into a RAM drive (only marginally quicker than SSD).

I also set the MySQL delay between rows to 0.1.

Another suggestion is to not worry so much about getting ‘everything’ imported, make a copy of your database and trim it down to 1,000 topics and 5,000 replies (Along with forums, categories, users etc) and verify all the data and get your custom importer working 100% and then do your full imoport. Waiting 24 hours for 3 million posts to be imported then finding out everything is mis matched tends not to bring much joy 😉

[Stephen Edgar]

We are not supporting importing form a remote database at this stage, theoritically it shouldn’t be that difficult with the correct access in place, but not at this stage.

It should work fine if you have a copy of your database locally though, most likely this is you didn’t select phpBB from the dropdown menu on the import screen.

Robin: I had a horrid week last week and am still catching up, read through 1/2 of bbPress.org this arvo and I will write a heap of replies tomorrow 😉