[daveandersononline]

Hi,

First of all great plugin thank you!

I’m fairly handy with the coding, but this has got me stumped. The theme seems to work almost perfectly, except the reply posts.

It’s picking up the css reply in my main theme, showing all links in the post as buttons.

http://www.florenceroad.com/forums/topic/deleted-my-purchase-now-widget/

I’ve tried to fix this for 4 hours now.

I’m happy to pay if somebody can just give me some direction!

Thanks again

[David Decker]

@bollocks187

I don’t agree here. SimplePress has do many features for a lot of users/use cases. Yes, it works, it’s active developed and maintained. I tested the new 5.0 beta two weeks ago and it’s still feature overload and a totally different user interface different from “normal” WP… And regarding translation they don’t go with WP standards here and so until they fix some things I could not get it into German. Old 4.x branch is no option because I need optimized code for a new project and also future-proof with WP 3.3+

bbPress — I only mean the plugin version 2.x — on the other hand is really simple but has all I need. It works with almost any theme/framework and I could easily tweak it via CSS. This is a big advantage. Performance-wise it’s really leightweight and future-proof with WP because of custom post types for forum contents.

YES, I know it has not so many features – a few could be added via plugin add-ons – and I assume a lot more will come in the next weeks or month.

IMHO bbPress 2.x is best for small to middle-range communities, best for simple support forums and such. If I need a full packed forum solution with ALL the many and big features I almost always will use a third-party solution like Vanilla, IPB or new XenForo. These have clean style and great UI in frontend AND backend. And with some work of integrating could be work together with WordPress too. — Just look at the newly launched support forum by iThemes.com – they use IPB Forums and it’s great for such a big community.

However, there are some great new bbPress forums out there, see at devpress.com, wpcandy.com, support.pippinsplugins.com, getshopped.com etc. So the bbPress plugin has already proven to manage such communities and they’re doing great.

I vote for bbPress and at the same time have much respect for the work of the Simple:Press devs but just would not use their system!

-Dave

[Jaja..]

Thanks for the help..

Nope totally not, just found that board system by accident..

I think bbPress is a great product and it works fine.

The few problems i face are based on WPMU install and testing it locally most of them are my own fault..

I’m trying to make a homepage (WP-website1) with only my blog onto it and a second page (WP-website2) called members with a few forums and some posts on helping very new WordPress users with just some easy steps, as i’m not a professional myself.

Nothing to difficult but the theme i’m using is this one and it’s a little bit old.

http://store.informationarchitects.net/product/ia³-template

It’s a great theme, and i only bought it because of it’s Responsive design. The double drop-down select menu’s when viewing on mobile device is just great.

After installing i started to delete almost every feature because i don’t need them, i Love to keep everything as simple and clean as possible. Less is more..

Because i’m not a Pro, and don’t know anything about PHP i just have to do everything by searching online, looking inside the WordPress Codex and copy-/pasting everything i see and what i think i can read-/understand.. (i do have HTML-/CSS knowledge)

So till now and still working on it i came up with this:

A custom made Widget that i have dropped on the homepage between the blog lay-out to let people know there is a support forum.

http://i56.tinypic.com/25gcb36.png

A tabbed forums view with different options.

http://i54.tinypic.com/2vjel3q.png

Latest topics view.

http://i52.tinypic.com/2rcydra.png

And i customized the Post Toolbar plugin from Master5o1

http://i52.tinypic.com/2zxxqbm.png

As you can see there is still lot to work on, the single pages , replies, edit pages and others.

Lucky it’s just a hobby and i have time.

** O there is one thing i would really love to see inside bbPRess and thats comments-/reply counts.

Just an option to view how many replies a user has given and maybe a user level attached to it.

Like less than 50 posts = New

50 to 100 = Average

250+ = Pro user.

That would be cool to have.

[c0cc0bill]

I have a different theme and i had to change loop-forums, loop-replies, loops topics and bbpress-css.

After each upgrade rewrite these files. All right.

Now i put the 3 files and css in the root of my theme but no good.

I put the 3 files and css in the root of my theme and deleted ones from plugin, but no good.

I copied BBP-themes in the root of my theme and deleted from plugin and not good.

How do? Tx

[shooo]

Hi

try to change your this css

.num, #forumlist small {

font: 11px Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;

text-align: center;

white-space: nowrap;

}

by

.num, #forumlist small {

font: 11px Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;

text-align: center;

}

[devotee]

I´m also having problem with this. I´m getting the forum to work, but I have problems getting access to css and template files.

I have created a child theme from the bp-default theme, which doesnt seem to support bbPress-templates, but still displays everything nicely somehow. Within this child-theme I change css and templates belonging to the bp-default theme and that works fine.

Now I would like to be able to modify the bbPress part of the site from this child theme aswell, but I cant because the theme has no template files for the bbPress installation (even though it presents the forum very nicely). I can change the css-part by just copying the css from the bbpress.css into my styles.css (it get´s priority). But there is no template-files to copy except those from the bbp-twentyten theme, and if I do, the appearance just breaks

What I want: The forum to look exactly like it does from the default bp-default theme, but with access to template files so I can remove and add stuff on my own.

Can anyone help me with this one?

[devotee]

Hi. I installed bbPress plugin in my buddypress/wp-site and it seems to be working alright.

Using the default buddypress theme, the bbPress-plugin integrates nicely, but since I want to style both my theme and the forum differently I created a child theme from the default buddypress theme. For now It´s just a style.css and some changes to the header.

When I try to integrate the bbPress-plugin with my child-theme, the styles arent working properly.

I think I followed the guide properly. I copied every file from the bbPress-theme to my child-theme, excluding the style.css (since there already is one, and it doesnt contain anything anyway?). I also merged the functions.php files, and added “add_theme_support( ‘bbpress’ );” to the top of it. Is there any step beyond this?

Everything functions as intended, but the styles arent working. The sidebar doesnt show up at all and paddings and such thing are no where to be found.

Anyone got any ideas what I might have missed?

[WhiteRau]

i got mine working almost without effort. i literally read the sticky at the top of this thread and it worked.

a couple of things to note, that people are stumbling over:

1) READ THE STICKY. don’t peruse it. READ IT.

2) the sticky actually says the same thing twice. COPY the CONTENTS of wp-contentpluginsbbpressbbp-themesbbp-twentyten to YOUR theme’s folder, whether it be a child theme or not. in my case the path was wp-contentthemesSuperTurboTheme.

3) it’ll ask it you want to overwrite ‘style.css’. don’t. just let the OS rename it to ‘style(2).css’.

4) ditto for the ‘functions.php’ file. it should, temporarily, be ‘functions(2).php.

5) MERGE the two functions.php files. i just copy/pasted everything from ‘functions(2).php’ to the bottom of the ‘functions.php’ file. just like in the sticky. i didn’t merge the ‘style.css’ and ‘style(2).css’ files. but i DID make sure the ‘Tags:’ line in my ‘style.css’ file included ‘bbPress’ as the first item, just to be sure. it was an old requirement that doesn’t seem to have been deprecated anywhere and i’m a belt-n-suspenders boy…

6) at the very top of your newly expanded ‘functions.php’ file, add the line ‘add_theme_support( ‘bbpress’ );’ to the very top. just like in the sticky. EVEN THOUGH THERE IS A SIMILAR LINE IN the bbPress’ functions.php file, YOUR functions.php file MUST HAVE THIS LINE as well. EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE MERGED.

7) reload.

don’t get clever. don’t reinvent. don’t assume anything. just follow the steps and you should be fine.

your only challenge now is figuring out how to do your CSS. the ‘style.css’ will control the WordPress portion of the site. it CAN handle the bbPress styling as well, but i prefer to leave it to bbPress.css (located in the ‘css’ folder you copied over) to handle the forum styles. its a bit of a headache sorting out the bevy of tags that get generates, but hey, it works. and i DO mean headache.

not to beat a dead horse, but the real challenge IS sorting out the secondary CSS. i recommend Firebug to help you drill down the the styles. the byzantine class structure can make your head spin. try using the elements that are relatively easy to spot. and REMEMBER THIS: NOT ALL CLASSES ARE IN THE STYLESHEET. this can really toss a wrench into things. they are added for future slice-n-dice, but seems overkill to me. low-order CSS has proved easier for me. i can’t foresee a reason to slice the site up so finely…but it’s futureproofed to the wheel-wells!

good luck. hope this was useful. i apologize if i missed anything. i tried to be thorough AND simple.

feel free to correct me if i stepped wrong somewhere. this is what worked to me.

WR!

[jellyjesus]

This is what my current forum pages looks like.

I want to make the author column width much smaller.

How would I do this?

I’ve gone into bbpress.css and made every td, th, bbp-author-reply possible and put it width:20%, but to no avail.

I’ve tried tinkering with the style.css, but not entirely sure what to change there.

Would appreciate some help please.

[Linesh Jose]

Hi folks,

I’m new to bbpress. on forums and topic page, the notice displays the avatar of last posed user. I want to remove it also I want to highlight the author name by using PHP not CSS.

please help me.

[zofar143x]

Because my main theme makes bbpress look really messy I did the following:

I went to the plugin theme folder and changed the css to make it a child of the theme I’m using instead of twentyten. I activated “bbPress (Twenty Ten)” in wordpress and now the forum layout looks like how it would be in twentyten but the rest of the site looks like the parent. Exactly like I want it to be. However, there are still some issues I can’t seem to resolve.

First thing is that the comments don’t allign well as you can see here:

http://tinypic.com/r/r77juw/5

Does anyone know how I can fix this?

[Anointed]

What function do I have to add to my plugin file in order to get bbPress to load the top level template files?

I have a plugin that has a structure as follows:

my-custom-theme/

plugin.php

my-custom-theme – includes all the top level templates like archive-forums.php, archive-topics.php, etc

my-custom-theme/bbpress – includes all the template files found in the standard bbPress plugin such as loop-forums.php, loop-replies.php, etc

my-custom-theme/css – includes bbpress.css

The problem I am having is when I activate my plugin, the css is being loaded properly from my plugin, and the template files found within the /bbpress directory are also loading properly from within my plugin.

THE PROBLEM:

When activated the top-level template files such as archive-forums.php, archive-topics.php, etc are not loading.

Instead, bbPress is loading the standard page.php file from twentyten, which is the theme I have activated.

So everything works, EXCEPT the loading of the top-level templates.

What function do I have to add to my plugin in order to get bbPress to also recognize those files?

*It is completely confusing as to why bbPress would see everything except those files….

And YEAH, I’ve tried everything I can think of for almost a week now. I’ve asked 2 other bbPress developers and neither of them has a clue either, so I’m not that ignorant of lazy.

Here is the 500th attempt at getting it right:

http://pastebin.com/tNKV9nT7

[shooo]

Thank you for your answer,

But I can’t integrate the widget as I wish in my design.

Indeed, I can’t integrate the excerpt of the replies, I can’t properly control the CSS and I can’t (of course) include the latest comments in the last forums’ replies.

I started by looking at the widget code by default, but I can’t decrypt properly.

query_posts is very simple and I usually use it in my templates; is much more customizable.

[Anointed]

I don’t see anything bbPress related in your theme. There is no bbpress.css stylesheet in the header, and the forums link goes to a 404 page.

Did you actually install the new bbPress 2x plugin?

[Anointed]

I took a quick peek at your link. Honestly I do not see anything at all which would cause the spacing like that.. it is very strange.

One place you might try asking is over at css-tricks, as they have a great forum for css issues and Chris is a genious at that kind of stuff.

As to removing the info boxes:

Unless you have manually replicated all of the bbPress templates and added them manually to your theme, then you are actually using the bbPress twentyten theme templates. (they are found inside the bbPress plugin folder)

In there you will find files like content-single-forum.php, content-single-topic.php, etc..

In those templates are functions like:

<?php bbp_single_forum_description(); ?>, <?php bbp_single_topic_description(); ?>, etc...

Those are the functions used to output the information blocks. You would need to remove those lines from the files in order to get rid of the boxes.

**Now obviously if you modify those files, then you will loose your changes every time you update bbPress, not advised….

Instead check out the theme compatibility thread in the forums here to learn how to make child themes so you can make changes without loosing those changes.

Or.. you can always take the ‘easy’ way out and simply add some css rules to your stylesheet to hide them. Not at all elegant but effective.

.div.bbp-template-notice.info { display: none; }

[rhodyjobs]

I need some help with the bbpress plugin, default theme in a custom template.

Please see: http://rhodyjobs.com/forums/topic/rhodyjobs-com-launches-new-forums-for-members/

Above the post, there is a spacing, which I cant find or remove in any css file.

Any ideas?

Also, I want to remove this box:

“This topic has 2 voices, contains 1 reply, and was last updated by George 2 days ago.”

But the only place I can find it is in the twentyten theme which i’m not using.

PLEASE HELP.

Thanks in advance.

[David]

@LifeFreeOrDie, I can’t answer your question completely but maybe I can give you a little help.

You can order your forums by defining the Order in the respective Forum’s admin page. Counting starts at 0, which is the default.

Creating sub-forms is simply a matter of creating a parent forum and then for each child (sub-) forum make that parent forum the Parent in Forum Attributes. (Parents that are defined as type Forums can contain their own topics but parents that are Categories only contain other forums.)

Unfortunately, in the forums index sub-forums are necessarily presented with their topic and reply counts in parenthesis as defined in bbp_list_forums() in loop-single-forum.php. What’s worse: there is no containing element around the count so it’s not possible to style those separately from the sub-form name. [@johnjamesjacoby or other admin: Can this be updated outside of core code?]

However, you can style the sub-forums with CSS as they are listed as a

.

[Trobee]

if you add

.bbp-author-avatar {

display: none;

}

to the css file andre pointed to it will probably stop all avatars being displayed anywhere in the forum

[Crisium]

@John,

I have tried to follow you procedure for getting bbPress intergrated into my current theme. After 10 hours of copying/pasting directories, files, adding code… I finally gave up.

As you said your self the bbPress as only one theme that supports it and that is the theme you have created, which is a modified twentyten. I think the bbPress fails as user friendly, because I need to manually change things on my harddrive and code to get my current theme to work.

Apparently there are not very many forum plugins for wordpress (well, not that many good ones). I would like to use yours and this is also why I invested 10 hours of my time trying to integrate it.

I’m going to try and explain what I have done, perhaps I misunderstand something with your procedure:

1. I’m using WordPress 3.2.1, theme Suffusion, forum bbPress 2.0

2. With this installment I can see I need to use your procedure description:

If this is not a custom theme under your control (meaning you are not the author) you’ll want to copy the entire “/bbpress/bbp-themes/bbp-twentyten” folder into your “wp-content/themes/%YOURTHEMENAME%” folder, and modify your style.css to make it a custom Child Theme of whatever your current theme is.

3. I copy my folder: C:inetpubwwwrootwpwp-contentpluginsbbpressbbp-themesbbp-twentyten and paste it into C:inetpubwwwrootwpwp-contentthemessuffusion

4. This means I now have a folder in my suffusion directory called “bbp-twentyten”

5. I now open the style.css file in the “C:inetpubwwwrootwpwp-contentthemessuffusionbbp-twentyten” directory and add “@import url(“../style.css”);”

6. I modify the styles.css file in the “C:inetpubwwwrootwpwp-contentthemessuffusionbbp-twentyten”, so that the plugin header now says “template: suffusion”

7. I now open the functions.php file in the “C:inetpubwwwrootwpwp-contentthemessuffusion” directory and add: add_theme_support( ‘bbpress’ );

As I understand your procedure that is what I’m suppose to do? Did I miss something?

regards,

Peter

[eraleks]

I just can’t make this work…

If I click on the show source code I can find the problem, but I just don’t get where and how I can remove the avatars in the files provided.

You can see my forum here: http://revyportalen.no/forums/forum/revyportalen-forum-2/

Help is very much appreciated! Especially if someone could point me straight to the solution since I don’t really know css

Aleks

[Anointed]

I want to provide some separation of the topics for the user to define which topics they have ‘read/viewed’.

Concept is like other forums ‘mark forum posts as read’.

One of the hardest thing for moderators to keep up with when working with very large active forums is knowing which topics they have read already. Many forum platforms make some type of change to a topic css once a user has viewed the topic.

There are many ways of accomplishing this, and frankly I am not sure which way is the most efficient, hence my request.

Please consider adding a system where a ‘topic-read’ css attribute is added to the topic_class.

Once this is in place, then I can choose what I want to do with it from there on the styling side.

[Gautam Gupta]

You would actually need to modify theme files, particularly the forum loop and CSS files to do that. It involves a bit of time and no one has tried to do it yet. I’ll see to it when I get time.

[ddlg2007]

Hi I have a question. How can I edit style.css without affecting my theme. So use the firebug to make changes but when I inspect objects the style is wp-content/themes/mytheme/style.css and i dont wanna edit my style of theme, only style of bbpress.

I try this:

Copy Files

If this is not a custom theme under your control (meaning you are not the author) you’ll want to copy the entire “/bbpress/bbp-themes/bbp-twentyten” folder into your “wp-content/themes/%YOURTHEMENAME%” folder, and modify your style.css to make it a custom Child Theme of whatever your current theme is. This is so theme updates don’t wipe

Add Theme Support

Now that you’ve got the files copied over, you’ll need to tell bbPress that you are in control of the theme situation. You do this by adding this to your functions.php file:

add_theme_support( ‘bbpress’ );out all your hard work later.

---

But dont work good because some subforums disappear and change the order. I like to stay like this with bbp-TwentyTen and modify aspects of my theme style.css without affecting primary.

[thetbasket]

Hi Travis,

Thanks for the response. My theme was different, as you had suggested, and I am working on it. Although I’m now in a little bit more of a complicated predicament because I am trying to use bbpress through buddypress, and on the buddypress install the forums options is not pointing the indicated page to the bbpress forums.

Anyway, I did misread or misunderstand your first suggestion – sorry about that. As far as creating a full-width template, I am nearly positive I did so (I created a template specifically for that page to be full width), but nevertheless I will double check next time.

I don’t want to get too deeply into this, but the fact that we use the word “blog” and “forum” already indicates that they are different even though they are both CMS’s. The issue is not that one is a CMS and the other is not, it is a matter of how the content is managed and it’s purpose.

A blog is a blog because, generally, one user is contributing the content that a multiplicity of users is commenting on. So a standard blog Write-and-Respond system works nicely, and works nicely even in a narrow space because it usually contains one article with comments on the article.

A forum, on the other hand, is a multiplicity of users creating multiple threads all scaffolded by an overarching structure of the forum and subforums. The way forums have been built thus far has been usually in a wide content format so users can see 1) The Thread title 2) The amount of replies 3) The last user that replied etc. etc. In other words, it is build upon a more horizontal management format, whereas the blog can get away with a more vertical format.

Of course now and into the future there will be all sorts of variations on this. But for the end user, I want a forum that is a forum, not a forum that is a blog. In other words, wide-formatted with the expected information that forums have traditionally contained up to this point.

The strong point of bbpress is its integration and especially it’s style integration. Anyone who has attempted to create themes for phpBB knows what a nightmare it can be. However, if you try to smush a phpBB forum in-between two or even besides one sidebar, see what happens. Not only that, but those sidebars from the blog are almost inherently irrelevant to the function of the forum. In other words — useless screen real estate being taken from what otherwise would be a smoothly functioning, articulated forum.

And I can understand that WordPress vanilla functions fine, and being opensource one could reprogram it into Duke-Nukem 3D, almost. As a user of wordpress, the most frustrating thing consistently is that I feel like I am hacking CSS and PHP files more than I am creating content, and perhaps this is because I am a bit persnickety and want a particular look, but a full width forum from a forum plugin? To me things like this (and there are enough) are just plain flaws in development. I shouldn’t need to hack anything to get a forum to operate in full width because that is how forums best operate according to contemporary standards. Perhaps you should need to hack to get something to operate somehow unique and fascinating, but hacking code to get something to perform as you would expect it to – from your hours and hours and hours of forum experience? To me this is on the development teams shoulders.

Again, thank you so much for taking the time to reply. I may be back after I have a chance to try what you had suggested.

By the way, after installing buddypress all of the groups, member pages, activity pages, etc. were ALL operating on full width. The only part of the entire install that persists in operating between my sidebars is bbpress, and it is the only one I am dissatisfied with. So now I have to go through hours of who knows what to get something working the way it always has worked.

Again, bravo for bbpress, it’s a great project with a great future, and there is a lot to be said for it. But that doesn’t excuse it from what needs work, and for those of us who want to deliver content, we would much rather spend our time on managing the delivery of content than on managing the content management system.

I’d rather be spending this time developing the forum, not on developing the forum development software.

[dominornovus]

Q2: Seems like you got a useful answer here: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/databases-1#post-93441

Q3: Using a web developer tool like Firebug will allow you to view the styles your admin panel has inherited: http://getfirebug.com/ If your styles are being ignored, Firebug will show you what’s overriding them. It will also tell you what style sheet the inherited CSS is contained in.

This could also be worth a try: http://webdesign.about.com/od/css/f/blcssfaqimportn.htm