[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Robert,

I’m guessing really but i’d suggest:

in style.css

Line 31:

#header, #posts {

width:760px;

}

should read:

#header, #posts {

width:[input new width];

}

in style.css

Line 45:

#header h1 {

background:url(“images/jillijheader4.jpg”) no-repeat scroll center top #999999;

border-bottom:1px solid #999999;

font-size:2em;

height:182px;

line-height:80px;

width:760px;

}

should read:

#header h1 {

background:url(“images/jillijheader4.jpg”) no-repeat scroll center top #999999;

border-bottom:1px solid #999999;

font-size:2em;

height:182px;

line-height:80px;

width:[input new width];

}

replace [input new width] with either a fixed width (1000px) or a percentage (100%).

Good luck

[rlebowitz10463]

Hi,

I am using bbpress for my forum page, located at polina-such.freehostia.com/bbpress.

I am using the cool TooNewsy theme. (http://www.bbpressthemes.net/too-newsy/)

The only problem I have been having is that I cannot extend my header across the page without it somehow knocking the sidebar under the forum posts! I want the sidebar to stay where it is, but I also need the header to stretch across the page and not end prematurely.

I have tried for days to fix the css to no avail. I have also tried reaching out to the developers but have not as of yet gotten a response.

I would greatly appreciate it if anyone here can help. Thank you very, very much!

Robert

[chrishajer]

@uhclem – I think you have exactly the right attitude to be involved with bbPress. Some tips:

1. Don’t modify any core bbPress files. Restrict your modifications to files in the my-templates and my-plugins folders. If you don’t have those folders, create them. They will be at exactly the same level as bb-templates and bb-plugins.

2. To start modifying the look of your forum, make a folder inside the my-templates folder, call it whatever you want (something unique, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe it a filename with no spaces though, like newtheme.) Now, copy every single file from the kakumei folder into this new folder. Now open up style.css and change the line that says Theme Name: Kakumei to say something like Theme Name: Custom Theme by uhclem. This name can have spaces in it. It’s this Theme Name that will show up in your bbPress admin section when you go to select a new theme in the Appearance tab. The screenshot will be the one from kakumei, but that’s only because you didn’t change it yet. You can worry about that later. If your new theme name does not show up in the bbPress admin, you did something wrong.

The files that end in .php are just like HTML files, but they are processed by the web server before sending to your browser. If you put just HTML into a file with a php extension instead of a htm or html extension, it will display just as if you had named it with html or htm. Try it.

Now, you need to look through some of those existing php files and see what’s going on. You will see some plain old HTML but you will also see some stuff inside blocks that look like this:

<?php do something(); ?>

PHP code will being with a <?php and end with ?> – the stuff inside those brackets is PHP code that will be interpreted by the web server before sending it to the browser. Any PHP code in a file with a PHP extension will not be sent to the browser. It is processed, for good or bad. If you get a white screen, it means you probably have a syntax error in your PHP code.

You can edit the PHP files with notepad, just as you did with batch files, but it’s better to use an editor with syntax highlighting, so you can see when you make a mistake in your PHP. Notepad++ is good and free on Windows. http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Once you get to that point, you can learn about all the cool things you can do with PHP and bbPress.

[kevinjohngallagher]

You’ve hit the nail on the head Aaronski, any form of moderation on bbPress is poor.

The simplist way to do this, is to remove the “Add New” link from your theme (simply add HTML comments around it), or you could hide the “Add New” link via CSS (which should be quicker):

a.new-topic

{

display:none;

}

The realism is, if your forum needs actual configuarable moderation, this might not be the software for you. Hope it is though, Kev

[johnhiler]

It’s probably easiest if you add this CSS to your style.css file:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/remove-tags

[kevinjohngallagher]

Marius,

My friend, no-one is attacking you here. You’re not using the default theme, you’re using a modified theme. I have the default theme and it doesn’t have a picture of Micahel Jackson anywhere (that i can see at least).

Your issue was a CSS issue, because you had placed attached your CSS code to the wrong DIV for what you were wanting to achieve. It’s nothing to do with BBpress, honestly mate, the issue was a CSS issue with CSS code that you added when you didn’t know what you were doing. A CSS website would make a world of difference to you and your knowledge and ability to edit the themes. I’m not saying that to be cocky, i’m saying it to give you the tools to do these things yourself

When Im asking specifically for location of a code, in the DEFAULT THEME that comes with BBPress, the best place to ask is of course BBPress own forum

That’s the key thing here mate, you were not asking that. You maybe thought you were, but the code that was wrong was in your CSS file, that you added – that’s nothing to do with BBpress.

Given that it was your 2nd thread and your 4th attempt at asking for this solution in under 24 hours, I tried to help out – i gave you the simplest answer because your understanding of CSS was limited . You didn’t understand the simple solutions presented, that’s your web development knowledge, nothing to do BBpress.

No-one is paid to be here matey, we’re all doing this because we want to help BBpress grow But that doesn’t mean we have to be at your beck and call for real time support, nor does it mean that we have to answer basic web design/development questions that don’t have anything to do with BBpress. I’m going to leave this here, clearly we have different opinions, and that’s cool – but for your sake mate, not mine, learning a bit of Web Development skills will make your BBpress life alot easier.

Take care

[chrishajer]

Marius-, kevinjohngallagher is correct. The issues you were having were purely CSS and template issues, not bbPress issues. Just because you’re using bbPress doesn’t make your question a bbPress question. To answer those questions would not be supporting bbPress, they’d be helping you design a forum theme. I just skipped over the question initially because it had nothing to do with bbPress.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I was hoping that someone could point me towards BBpress or Automattic’s official stance on this. From what I’ve read, the PHP code that interacts with WordPress/BBpress should all be released under the GPL, but HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Images are not.

I bring this up, because a fellow developer (an old Bbprogress contributor), pointed me towards this piece by Jeff Chandler: http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2010/02/08/where-is-the-line-drawn/

The main thing that caught my attention was the comment of Chip Bennet , who states that:

[a] plugin uses a separate library – and it is that library (presumably not released under GPL) that requires purchase if it is used on a commercial site.

This practice is perfectly acceptable under the GPL. Whether or not it is acceptable under the double-secret probation, unwritten, subjective rules of the plugin repository is anyone’s guess.

Can anyone shine some light on this from a BBpress perspective?

I’m going to quote Matt here:

…that themes link and use lots of internal WordPress functions, which make them linked under the GPL and subject to being a GPL-compatible license.

If a theme (or a plugin) used no internal WP functions or APIs, then it could probably be considered independent, but that would be really really hard for a theme.

Basically, I’m asking because BBpress, probably more than WP (at least if you’re only using WP as blog platform) has potentail for premium theme’s and plugins at this moment in time. Getting some clarification would make things alot simpler.

My real concern here is one that won’t go down well…

BBpress forums have 1 current/active moderator

I ask for two reasons.

Should a premium theme/plugin be created and sold, and given that BBpress currently has 1 active Moderator, what is there to stop someone posting the code here or reusing the code that is NOT under GPL?

Not a huge concern of mine just now, but it seems like a likely question of anyone supporting premium BBpress additions.

[Miroslav Popov]

Hello,

my forum (http://forexstrategybuilder.com/forum/) doesn’t show the icons for attachment plugin and from topick icons plugin. I think there is problem with finding the right path to the images. The IE shows broken image icon.

The attachment plugin attaches images properly in the post. The problem is only with the icons. Probably the path set in the CSS is wrong. I haven’t change it.

Any ideas?

[gofastbargains]

we actually did it manually, cutting and paste from wp-header to bb-header, it was rather intensive work, and you have to know css, it was a good thing my bro is a css pro. simply copy and paste did not make it work, he had to realign and figure out the original wp theme and past in the correct line in the bb theme. if you look at… http://gofastbargains.com/ and open another tab and open http://gofastbargains.com/Forum/ . you’ll see they do not match up perfectly. We’ll fix it eventually, but it was about 6 hours of work, installing, integrating, and theme matching.

[Ryan Hellyer]

Hi everyone,

I’ve written a WordPress plugin which allows you to integrate your WordPress theme, widgets and many plugins into your bbPress theme. This is an alpha launch, so it’s probably buggy. Please file bug reports in the comments of the blog post please.

http://pixopoint.com/theme-integrator-alpha-launch/

This system DOES NOT require deep integration and does not suffer the performance hits that deep integration normally applies. This simply copies your HTML markup over after you set a bunch of things in each theme. If you don’t know how to do a 100% perfect integration of your theme already the old fashioned way (copying HTML and CSS across), this new system will not help you at all as you need to set that up already. Once it is setup however, the changes you make in your WordPress theme will be automagically applied to your bbPress site, along with changes such as plugins, widgets etc.

I’m not providing free support for this. Doing these types of integrations is very time consuming and I can’t afford to spare that much time to help you all integrate your themes sorry. I am keen to see bug reports etc though and will try to get them sorted as soon as possible.

The system works across a range of different softwares, not just bbPress. You can see a demo of it in my own support forum which uses SMF … http://pixopoint.com/forum/index.php?topic=1385.0

[paulhawke]

@Michael R – I am creating an admin page to let you change the voting text – it will let you say whatever you like. Out of the box, it will say “Add your vote of thanks”, and “# said thanks for this post”. The admin page will let you purge all votes, choose if you want the thanks div to appear before or after the actual post (to aid in CSS styling) and some prefix / suffix suffix text (to aid in CSS styling).

Note: if you enable the plugin you will need to tweak the CSS of your forum template to style it. That goes way beyond the scope of the actual plugin itself though!

[chrishajer]

You’re going to need to add an extra div in there, to wrap around everything in the middle that you don’t want to have a transparency on (so you can make it white or grey.) Right now, there is no element you can apply that background to without affecting the header and the nav. So, you need to add a new div that starts right after the nav, and ends right after the footer, then you need to give that a background color or more opacity.

You also have some weird inheritance going on with the CSS. There are at least four stylesheets loading. Hard to see right off the bat which one is messing with you.

http://www.justinbieberzone.com/forums/bb-templates/kakumei/style.css

http://www.justinbieberzone.com/wp-content/themes/MusicGlobe/css/screen.css

http://www.justinbieberzone.com/wp-content/themes/MusicGlobe/css/print.css

http://www.justinbieberzone.com/wp-content/themes/MusicGlobe/style.css

[Michael]

If seen numerous forums with the same problem.

It seems the link to your CSS for the forum is wrong. I may be incorrect on this, but that’s where the background is declared. You have this:

/home/metroadv/public_html/justinbieberzone/forums/bb-templates/kakumei/style.css

It should be this

http://www.justinbieberzone.com/forums/bb-templates/kakumei/style.css

See if that makes a difference.

[merc70]

Hello everyone, we’ve started a forum about a week ago and decided to use a template to skin the board. After a good couple of hours, we managed to match the forums colors and feel to our main website. I’m not really well-versed with CSS or PHP but i’m familiar enough to experiment, tinker and achieve the results I usually want. And besides, i’m learning as I go!

But there’s one thing that’s sort of baffling me. I’m trying to add our “logo” image in the header, right where the normal forum name text would appear. Usually, that’s just as simple as going to the header itself and replacing the PHP code used to get the name of the forum with an IMG html tag with width, height, etc.. However, the image won’t appear at all! We’ve double checked the directory, made sure it was pointed to the right place, checked the chmod settings on the image and everything should be fine, but the image still doesn’t appear. The result is in the screen cap below:

http://marknine.com/image/ioforums.jpg

Is there something specific i’m supposed to be looking for? In the CSS file or the header.php file itself?

header.php

<div class="header-wrapper">

<div class="header pagewidth">

<!-- TITLE -->

<h1><a href="<?php bb_uri(); ?>"><?php bb_option('name'); ?></a></h1>

<?php if ( bb_get_option('description') ) : ?><h2><?php bb_option('description'); ?></h2><?php endif; ?>

<!-- END TITLE -->

</div>

</div>

CSS

/* header & nav */

div.header-wrapper {

background:#222 url('images/header.png') repeat-x scroll left top;

}

div.header {

border-top:10px solid #E05900;

padding:40px 0 40px 10px;

margin:0 auto;

}

[Adam Harley (Kawauso)]

Sure.

Some example output

<ul>

<li class="forum_subforum"><a href="http://www.foo.bar/forums/forum/ideas-comments" title="">Ideas & Comments</a>

<ul>

<li class="forum_cat"><a href="http://www.foo.bar/forums/forum/questions" title="">Questions</a>

<ul>

<li class="forum_subforum"><a href="http://www.foo.bar/forums/forum/metsoc" title="">Meetings / Socials</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="forum_subforum"><a href="http://www.foo.bar/forums/forum/tips-amp-tricks" title="">Tips & Tricks</a>

<ul>

<li class="forum_subforum"><a href="http://www.foo.bar/forums/forum/gigs" title="Music, bands, all that...">Gigs</a>

<ul>

<li class="forum_cat"><a href="http://www.foo.bar/forums/forum/everything-else" title="">Everything else</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li class="forum_subforum"><a href="http://www.foo.bar/forums/forum/sports" title="">Sports</a></li>

<li class="forum_subforum"><a href="http://www.foo.bar/forums/forum/minutes" title="">Minutes</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

In a sidebar, styled with CSS: http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/385/capturecr.png

[ootes]

Inside my loop in front-page.php i want a custom class

like:

<tr class="bb-precedes-sibling bb-follows-sibling bb-child ????"><br />

<td><div class="nest"><a href="http://www.example.com/forum/example">Example</a><br /><small> Examples of examples</small></div></td><br />

<td class="num">99</td><br />

<td class="num">1029</td></p>

<p></tr>

on the place of the questionmarks i would like to have a category id as a class.

so i can customise each category in css

can someone help me out?

[tonicarr]

I have a WP blog that I am adding BBPress to, it loads correctly I have it integrated with WP. When I try to add a custom theme to my-templates, it loads but when I look at the source code the file path for the style sheet, for the custom theme is going to bb-templates not my-templates.

I have checked the permissions for both my-templates and bb-templates and it is 755.

This is the source code:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.troubledteenblog.com/forum/bb-templates/Crystal/style.css&#8221; type=”text/css” />

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.troubledteenblog.com/forum/bb-templates/Crystal/layout.css&#8221; type=”text/css” />

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.troubledteenblog.com/forum/bb-templates/Crystal/js/tabber.js”></script&gt;

I even put the style sheet in the bb-templates/Crystal and it still does not work.

Help would really be appreciated.

[eyashwant]

I installed wordpress mu and bbpress in single database and installed integration plugins of respective ones on both. And configured it.

As of today mine is the latest wordpress mu version and bbpress version. The problem I am facing is :

1) Login integration

2) User roles integration

3) Theme integration

In detail :

1) Login integration :

When I login in to wordpress and then move to forum, I am logged in. Also when I logout of wordpress and then go to forum I am logged out. This works perfectly. The problem is when I login in to forum and then move to wordpress, it does not work. Also when I logout at forum and then move to wordpress I am still logged in. I can access wp-admin. When I access wp-login it seems like I am logged out. But if I access wp-admin I am logged in. If I press log out I get error :

You are attempting to log out of Test 1

Please try again.

URL of where I am getting is http://test1.soulblog.net/wp-login.php?action=logout_wpnonce=f3ec0d7e0f

2) User roles, in wordpress I installed Role manager. In bbpress I see the registered users as “Inactive (no role)”

3)I want to integrate wordpress theme in the forum. I followed the steps below :

____________________________________________

styling your forum

1. Open bb-config.php and add the following line (replacing PATHTOYOUR with the

relative path to your blog):

require_once(‘/PATHTOYOUR/wp-blog-header.php’);

2. Navigate to the folder for the theme you are using on the forum (the default is

Kakumei, which is in /bb-templates/kakumei) and open the header.php

file. Replace the contents with <?php get_header(); ?>.

3. After the <?php get_header(); ?>, ����������������������������������insert the following line of code:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bb_stylesheet_uri(); ?>”

type=”text/css” />.

4. You can do the same with the footer, replacing it with <?php get_footer(); ?>

if you wish.

5. Open the style.css file for the bbPress theme you are using. Search for the

following line in the header: class.

background: url(‘images/page_header_bblogo.png’) no-repeat

Remove that line and save the file.

6. View the forum. It should now be very similar in look and feel to the rest of the

blog network.

__________________________________________

This replaced the header and footer, but did not integrate well.

So some one please guide me with these 3 issues and get me solved asap.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Features

It lists the 7 Features that BBpress hopes to achieve.

* Fast and light

* Simple interface

* Customizable templates

* Highly extensible

* Spam protection

* RSS Feeds

* Easy integration with your blog

Who here thinks BBpress in its current state nails half of these?

1. Fast and Light? Slower and heavier with teh whole backpress XML-RPC debacle.
2. Simple interface? I’ve issues with it, but its alot better than it was.
3. Customizable templates? Half of the outputs are hardcoded into the core, and most of the CSS specific code is at the child and not the parent, meaning large hacks are required constantly.
4. Highly extensible? Really… 1.0.2’s been out for over 6 months now, and i’ve not seen a huge amount of plugins – worse what plugins there were seem to be broken.
5. Spam protection? Akismet is killing us. Forum are different to blog posts by their nature (one way, verus two way, versus collaborative discussions), while my own experience, i spend more time cleaning forums up (usually undeleting) than i ever do on my blogs with Akismet.
6. RSS Feeds? nice one.
7. Easy integration with your blog? seriously…

Lets focus on getting BBpress to meet the bare minimum of what it says on the tin, then maybe worry abotu smileys/FBconnect/Emai…sorry…Private Messaging once the product delivers that it set out to do.

Night all

[Elias]

The one thing I love on bbPress

The one thing I love on bbPress is: It is simple and fast. “Simple” means, its functionality is easy to understand and to use for a less experienced internet user and there are no features distracting from the one core thing in a forum, from that funny discussion thing. And “Fast” means, that the bbPress core is even faster than the rather minimalist PunBB on the virtual server I use bbPress on. These are the two “features” of bbPress I really want to see in the future.

The things I hate on WordPress

Following the current discussion reminds me on my own experience with the great WordPress blog software. I am a WordPress user since WP 1.5.x, and WP 1.5.x was the software making me a blogger. It was easy to use, had a clean and simple user interface for the blogger, could be extended easily and replaces my simple home-written system after one week of testing and comparing to s9y.

Now, I do hate my long ago decision for WP sometimes. The current WP version 2.8.x is bloated, slow and without a good caching plugin not well-suited for a blog with readers.

As an example, there is a tiny german blog filled by me and less frequent some other people. It is called “Blah”, and most of its postings are simply links to other internet resources, mostly political, conspirational and funny ones. Did I mention that the blog is called “Blah”? It is not really a “successful” one, in the last six months there were approximately 2,000 visits per day, that’s not much. The “average visitor” requests five postings, and only one percent of them ever leaves a comment. The blog’s database contains 4,300 posts at the moment, that’s not much too. If I deactivate the WP Super Cache plugin, the server fails to handle that little load, the response time of the tiny blog grow to 30 to 50 seconds, the apache processes accumulates and finally the server runs out of virtual memory, giving visitors that funny “Out of memory” PHP error messages or a plain white page.

This is a situation totally unwanted for a bulletin board, which is a highly dynamic kind of website that can not be cached as easy as the less frequent views of a blog.

From bbPress 0.9.x to 1.0.x, the number of database queries to view the same page has nearly doubled, and the execution time has grown by approximately 60 percent on the same server. From the user point’s of view, it was exactly the same page, and bbPress is at the moment still performant enough to be better than any other bulletin board software. But from my point of view it remembers me to the things I experienced again and again with many new WordPress versions in the past, reaching the current point of a blog, which isn’t made to have more than a handful of readers. But for a WP blog, I can work around with WP Super Cache, for forums this approach is nearly impossible.

Some words about readers

I’m looking at the statistics generated from the apache logfiles of the Blah-blog for the last six months. It is a blog in german language, and of course most readers are living in Germany, less in Austria or Suisse, some in the Netherlands, Danmark, Belgium, Poland, Russia or Hungary too. These are not readers from the so called “third world”. (There is only one world, and we all have to share it!) In the last six months, 19 percent of the Blah-blog readers used an old dial-up modem connection to access it. (Identified by the rather speaking hostnames given in germany for that kind of connection I can identify, there may be some more readers with a low-bandwidth connection.) For this fifth part of my readers (which may be a representative value for other websites in germany too, but most people seems not interested in this kind of information), every use of large JavaScript magic which has to be loaded via a low-bandwidth connection gives an impression of slowness, and this is something I do not want to give them. That’s a reason for the rather minimalistic design of this blog.

Let me compare that 19 percent to another statistical number for the Blah-blog. 12 percent of all readers uses that fu… fine Internet Explorer 6.0 for surfing. (Identified by the user-agent string, which may be faked in rare cases.) The IE 6 is an old and ugly browser with many problems and a CSS box model interpretation giving a good headache to designers, and there are much better browsers out for free. But in many cases it is unwanted to exclude that 12 percent of website users or to give them a totally trashed design experience. It is also amazing, how many people are still using Windows 98 or ME or even Windows NT 4.0. I assume these people use rather old computers, still working for their personal requirements, so they don’t want to throw them to waste. Yes, there are people out there, which are poor and simply cannot spend a few hundred euros for new hardware every few years — me too. These are people I don’t want to exclude from any website I maintain, and especially I don’t want to exclude these from pages about political or cultural subjects. Every kind of bloat is wrong in my point of view.

(I use bbPress for a small forum on an uncommercial artists’ webpage, and it is great for that. This usage is my reason why I’m maintaining an inofficial german translation of bbPress, there is simply no language file for German at the moment, and not to share this work is stupid.)

Some words about the dashboard

The current bbPress dashboard is fine, it is aesthetical appealing, easy to use (compared to other bulletin boards’ backends) and fast even via a low-bandwidth connection and on a not up-to-date computer. It can be used with all browsers, and it makes all administrative tasks easy. The current WordPress dashboard sucks. It is unuseable slow with the Opera browser, and even with other browsers needs an enourmeous transfer of data and an long initialization time before one can do that simple thing which is blogging: writing a new post. If someone uses an older computer (older than five years), it is unuseable with any browser, and it is unbelievable frustrating to use via a dialup connection. And no, that “Google Gears” stuff does not help.) The huge amount of features are overwhelming for an unexperienced user, and for the little artists’ site (with eight authors) I still have to help some people for every post they want to blog. Since I had to upgrade that site to WP 2.8.x (it used 2.0.x and 2.3.x for a long time), the other authors hate me. Some of them are poor people. I recommend the usage of BlogDesk for them, but sometimes there are tasks which cannot be done with BlogDesk, as deleting an unwanted idiot’s comment or declaring a post as sticky (to announce an action, happening, exhibition, sound vernissage, reading, party, etc.). Since WP 2.8.x, the posting frequency of some co-authors is reduced to zero, and if I had the possibility for it, I would create my own WordPress fork (a DietPress for people who wants blogging without bloat).

And this is the way bbPress should avoid, in my opinion.

The bbPress of the future I want

bbPress is great! The bbPress core is good, and the features in an out-of-the-box installation are enough in many cases. But of course, there are things that could be improved, and there are many features often missed by people who wants a bulletin board. The probaly most wanted features are (list may be incomplete)

• eMail notification for new posts
• A kind of bbCode, which meets better the standard people expect in a BB software
• An improved editor, helping the user to do the wanted markup (may be bloaty magic WYSIWYG, but even eight buttons with a little JavaScript are better than nothing for the inexperienced user)
• An internal system of personal messaging (I hate it, but others love it)
• Attachment of files to a post
• Perhaps an avatar system independent from Gravatar
• An easy to extend user profile with additional informations
• A “who is online now” display
• Counters how often a post has been read
• A “terms of usage” statement which is required to be accepted by newly registered users
• An extended search with criteria as forum, tag, date range, username. (The existing search is better than the WordPress search, but I can still be improved. In a support forum with ten thousands of topics, it would be good to have the accumulated information more “findable”.)
• An interactive (and plugin-extensible and i18nable) help system for all core bbPress features, explaining the bbPress usage to inexperienced users and the concepts they cannot understand directly, especially tags. This is something I haven’t seen in any other BB software, but it is something really needed. It may even contain some words about netiquette…
• Perhaps a “widget system” similar to WP as a simple way to modify the order of appearance of the displayed entities without editing in themes

And of course, bbPress must remain performant, non-bloated and easy to integrate with WordPress. That’s a lot…

Many of these frequently requested features are not a good “standard” functionablity.

• The eMail notification is fine for spammers too. I am registered in some boards with this “feature”, and from time to time someone registers, writes spammy posts to various topics and the BB software dutifully and reliable sends that spam to a lot of users, before a moderator can do something. That’s why I am deactivating it always — one day, I received more than 100 mails “from my favorite forum”… aaargh!
• An over-improved editor slows down the forum for people with old hardware and makes the forum unusable for blind people with their strange solutions for surfing. (Yes, some of my “readers” are blind.)
• Personal massaging is a poor reinvention of good old internet eMail that sucks. For someone active on various boards, he has to check it messages in many places, which is ugly.
• An extended user profile is exactly the thing spammers want. The links in approximately 5 percent of my eMail spam are going to user profiles in bulletin boards, which are misused in many ways.
• Every upload possibility to the server can be a security problem, can be used by spammers to put spammy graphics in the internet or can consume execessive hard disc space on the server if heavily used.

But of course these features are wanted in many cases.

We should have a bbPress slogan for all future development. My suggestion is: Let’s make simple things easy, and let’s make complex things possible.

Learning from that part of WordPress which sucks means: Doing it better in bbPress. The core system should kept as a small one, perhaps a little smaller than the actual core. (The current user profile is sometimes unwanted.) And all additional features should be implemented in plugins, that a forum administrator can activate and configure as needed.

Core Plugins

But plugins are a huge problem too. Using a plugin indenpendent from the core system means: Making the update of bbPress to a new version sometimes to a migraine upgrade, whenever the needed plugins do not work with the newer version. Sometimes, I have this problem with one of my sites based on WordPress. And if the plugin’s functionality does require editing in the themes, it excludes less-experienced forum-administrators with a lack of PHP knowledge from using the plugins, which is not exactly the way to make complex things possible.

So there should be a set of plugins which are part of the bbPress release, which are developed together with the core system, let’s call them “core plugins”. It is not required to activate them to have a simple and basic bulletin board, but if someone do so, he will never have problems with upgrades. The “core plugins” are guaranteed to be delivered and to work with every release version and every security fix ever released. We have this kind of “core plugins” already, bozo users and Akismet. But it is a concept to be extended. A better post editor, a “terms of usage” page, a PM system, an internal avatar system, attachments to posts and all the administrative stuff around these features are good candidates for “core plugins”. If someone does not need them, he does not activated them. But if someone activates them and only them, this will never make the next bbPress release to a upgrade hell.

There may be bbPress-tags which are implemented empty if a core plugin isn’t activated, to make it easy to program the default theme and any other theme independent from the activated set of “core plugins” and without that sucking lines of if (function_exists ('bb_great_feature')) bb_great_feature ();. This kind of interface can be defined long before the “core plugins” are stable, and it can be documented for theme developers to allow them making their themes future-proof. (Oh yes, we need some good themes, the default one is fine, but some people want a richer selection.)

The bbPress features eighty percent of people want can be implemented in “core plugins”. Simple things will be easy. And if someone wants a small bbPress, that’s easier, he simply does not need to activate any “core plugin”. And there is still a plugin interface which makes complex things possible — sometimes a little editing in themes is required, but most people never needs to do so.

That’s the way bbPress should go, in my opinion.

(It may be a way for the future of WordPress too. But that’s not the topic here, and the WP developers do their work for a huge community of users and simply cannot change earlier decisions easily.)

And excuse my english. My poetic german is much better… and shorter.

[grassrootspa]

@ timskii, great observations. re: “There’s a risk of being unable to upgrade because a key plugin won’t work anymore” and “Joanna Average forum reader doesn’t care about any of that, and is probably keener on things like WYSYWYG, email, etc”:

This is exactly why some of the more widespread plugins and features should be incorporated into the core as optional features one can turn on or off. It seems silly to force someone to download a plugin and mess with the template to do basic bulletin board admin tasks like display how many times a topic has been viewed, throw an icon next to each forum topic, allow rich text for those posting.

My only major complaint after a year of bbPress use is the lack of features/polish that exist in vBulletin. Simply put, its just too bare after initial install. I know this will be extremely unpopular to many of you, but over the past couple years there have been many great plugins developed, like private messaging, TinyMCE/rich text, topic views, Allow Images, Smilies, User Directory, Members Online, Related Topics, Reputation, Top Posters, Terms of Service, and some of these features should really be incorporated into the Core as OPTIONS that can be turned and off. So should stuff like the ability to set default topic icons, human test for signups (@$%@%$ spam users), widgets for the sidebar, ability to delete topics, Post Rating, etc. I’m not saying every single feature out there should be incorporated, but what is the hangup with more stuff that can be optionally turned on or off in the admin? If its in the Core, its not going to break when a new version comes out, and additional plugins can be developed to customize those features even more!

Right now bbPress is VERY bare after initial install so multiple plugins are required to snazz it up…and you can’t even edit the css or template from inside the bbpress admin. And yes there are plugins for everything but the kitchen sink, but some of the older plugins don’t work in newer versions of bbPress! Not sure how many of use also use IntenseDebate, but bbPress software’s core admin should consider have some of the same stuff which can easily be turned on or off, like voting, reputation, smilies (http://intensedebate.com/features or http://intensedebate.com/plugins)

How cool would it be for a brand new bbPress install to optionally display which users are online, how many views a topic has, or topic icons right out of the box with no fiddling with the css or template files/additional plugin installs? I’m not saying a Nintendo emulator or Weatherbug display should be built in, but if bbPress remains so barebone, it won’t fill the free-easy-to-install easy-to-use vBulletin alternative niche (it should).

[Olympus]

Theme integration can still be performed without having to turn bbPress into a plugin, and in fact, it can be done via a simple CSS trick ( that means that the default CSS of bbPress should be rewritten so that it becomes more flexible, and every element ( forum tables, forms etc… ) should act as “objects” which can be automatically stretched vertically independently of their parents or I don’t know, where the parents will be objects in the WP stylesheet ) . So again, for theme integration, NO NEED TO TURN BBPRESS INTO A PLUGIN, because it’s just a CSS issue ( + little PHP coding, nothing serious ) !

Connecting the Admin sides of WP and bbPress ? This can be easily done via an OPTIONAL plugin ( or via XML-RPC calls, so that you can handle your bbPress forum even if it isn’t in the same host ) .

Turning bbPress into a plugin would be a nightmare, think of all the unnecessary WP calls … Why did I choose bbPress again ? To have a light forum or to have TWO frameworks ( WordPress and bbPress ) + unnecessary calls and files ?

The reason I choose bbPress at the beginning ( 3~4 years ago ) is because it’s from the creators of WordPress, so I hoped that it will be as easy to customize as WordPress, and that’s what I got ( even though, at the beginning it was really hard for me because I had to guess the function names, as there’s no Codex for bbPress ) and I’m very satisfied . I had the choice between bbPress, PunBB and Vanilla ( the lightest forums out there, and at the time, Vanilla had a greater number of plugins than bbPress ), but I stick with bbPress because it’s the easiest one to customize . So for those who think that bbPress can’t compete in the light forums market, you’re wrong !

[Michael]

I agree with Chrishajer. I didn;t know that bbPress does it without a plugin. This as I did not use my forum at all until I had some plugins installed (including bbcode).

@Chrishajer: I don’t think it would have anything to do with the CSS file. I’m sure there’s a file (I haven’t looked) that has the function that parses the post.

Regards

Michael

[bingsterloot]

Hi there

This might not be to any importance of you, but your forum has massive css problems on a Mac platform, so it messes up badly (