[hotforwords]

I like the topic_page_links() that exists in the kakumei theme, but when the number of posts gets too large it stretches out the page.

Are there any arguments for this tag to limit the number of pages it shows?

Here is an example on my forum: http://www.hotforwords.com/forums/

Or is there a way to use CSS to have them line break?

The navigation topic_pages()<s/trong> does a cool thing by breaking up the pages with the … but I can’t get that tag to work properly on the home page.

Thanks!

Marina

[_ck_]

You might want to create a static page outside of your bbPress installation that still uses the matching header and footer you have in bbPress. Well it’s very easy.

Make yourself a directory above bbPress with any name you’d like, let’s say “/about/”

In “/about/” make an index.php with this content:

<?php

require('../forums/bb-load.php');    // change /forums/ to your actual forum path

add_action('bb_head','about_css');

include(bb_get_active_theme_uri()."header.php");



function about_css() {   //  put any custom CSS you want in here

echo '<style>

img {border:0;}

</style>';

}

?>



<h3 class="bbcrumb"><a href="<?php bb_option('uri'); ?>"><?php bb_option('name'); ?></a> &raquo; About</h3>



<h2>About</h2>



Your "about" text goes here!



<?php  include(bb_get_active_theme_uri()."/footer.php"); ?>

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

It looks like the ‘loop’ for your posts is missing.

In your source, you mention http://www.theacerguy.com/forum/bb-templates/theAcerGuyForum/forumStyle.css which doesn’t exist, and really should be in my-templates

It’s really like your topic.php is missing all the stuff from <?php do_action('under_title'); ?> down to the if open then reply_ok.

Do you have deep integration going on? You seem to be pulling WP header stuff down.

[lolos]

davidbaldwin,

How did you change the font size and color of the bbpress in your wordpress theme? are you using two separate css style sheets or only one?

Can you give me some instructions on how did you make bbpress work within wordpress theme? i.e. when you click on forum it opens bbpress forum in the same page under word press header??

Please some one help me.. I spent over 4 days trying to understand how do just that!!

[reclaimyourskin]

Sorry guys, I thought my problem was resolved but it looks like i’ve spoke to soon.

The code _CK_ suggested below, worked wonders to add a new “on” class on my forum links:

<li<?php if ($current_forum_id=get_forum_id()) {echo " class='on'";} ?>>

Problem!

The trouble is that the unique “on” class is being displayed on every forum link, when I need it to only display when i’m viewing forum 2 for example. Basically, i need a unique css class and current forum marker so the user knows which forum they are currently viewing.

Below is the souce code for all of forum.php (if anyone has time to have a quick look i’d really appreciate it).

<?php bb_get_header(); ?>

<h3><?php forum_name(); ?> Forum</h3>

<ul id=”forumnav”>

<li<?php if ($current_forum_id=get_forum_id()) {echo ” class=’on'”;} ?>>” title=”Latest homepage”><span>Latest<img src=”images/white-arrow.gif” style=”padding: 0 0 3px 5px” width=”10″ height=”5″ border=”0″ /></span>

<li<?php if ($current_forum_id=get_forum_id()) {echo ” class=’on'”;} ?>>forum/forum2″ title=”Forum 2″><span>Forum 2</span>

<li<?php if ($current_forum_id=get_forum_id()) {echo ” class=’on'”;} ?>>forum/forum3″ title=”Forum 3″><span>Forum 3</span>

<li class=”<?php echo $class;?>”>forum/forum3″ title=”Forum 3″><span>Forum 3</span>

<?php if ( $topics || $stickies ) : ?>

<table id=”latest”>

<tr>

<th><?php _e(‘Topic’); ?> — <?php bb_new_topic_link(); ?></th>

<th><?php _e(‘Posts’); ?></th>

<th><?php _e(‘Last Poster’); ?></th>

<th><?php _e(‘Freshness’); ?></th>

</tr>

<?php if ( $stickies ) : foreach ( $stickies as $topic ) : ?>

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

<td><?php bb_topic_labels(); ?> <big>“><?php topic_title(); ?></big></td>

<td class=”num”><?php topic_posts(); ?></td>

<td class=”num”><?php topic_last_poster(); ?></td>

<td class=”num”>“><?php topic_time(); ?></td>

</tr>

<?php endforeach; endif; ?>

<?php if ( $topics ) : foreach ( $topics as $topic ) : ?>

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

<td><?php bb_topic_labels(); ?> “><?php topic_title(); ?><?php topic_page_links(); ?></td>

<td class=”num”><?php topic_posts(); ?></td>

<td class=”num”><?php topic_last_poster(); ?></td>

<td class=”num”>“><?php topic_time(); ?></td>

</tr>

<?php endforeach; endif; ?>

</table>

<div id=”viewdiv”>

<ul id=”views”>

<li class=”view”>” class=”rss-link”><?php _e(‘<abbr title=”Really Simple Syndication”>RSS</abbr> feed for this forum’); ?>

</div>

<div class=”nav”>

<?php forum_pages(); ?>

</div>

<?php endif; ?>

<?php if ( bb_forums( $forum_id ) ) : ?>

<h2><?php _e(‘Subforums’); ?></h2>

<table id=”forumlist”>

<tr>

<th><?php _e(‘Main Theme’); ?></th>

<th><?php _e(‘Topics’); ?></th>

<th><?php _e(‘Posts’); ?></th>

</tr>

<?php while ( bb_forum() ) : ?>

<?php if (bb_get_forum_is_category()) : ?>

<tr<?php bb_forum_class(‘bb-category’); ?>>

<td colspan=”3″><?php bb_forum_pad( ‘<div class=”nest”>’ ); ?>“><?php forum_name(); ?><small><?php forum_description(); ?></small><?php bb_forum_pad( ‘</div>’ ); ?></td>

</tr>

<?php continue; endif; ?>

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

<td><?php bb_forum_pad( ‘<div class=”nest”>’ ); ?>“><?php forum_name(); ?><small><?php forum_description(); ?></small><?php bb_forum_pad( ‘</div>’ ); ?></td>

<td class=”num”><?php forum_topics(); ?></td>

<td class=”num”><?php forum_posts(); ?></td>

</tr>

<?php endwhile; ?>

</table>

<?php endif; ?>

<?php post_form(); ?>

</div> <!– End Content –>

<?php bb_get_footer(); ?>

Thanks again sambauers, _CK_ and other mods – you’re doing a great job.

[mshakour]

Hello bbPress Community Members,

This is the Arabic translation for bbPress, I’ve done it 5 months ago with 0.9.0.2

I was a little bit lazy about posting it here, dunno why

Till i checked out this post mintues ago , #thanks _ck_

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/check-out-this-very-nice-r-t-l-arabic-bbpress

All that i do know that alot of people love it in Arabic and already using the Arabic version of bbPress.

Also, I’ve made a complete RTL version with heavy modifications on template files and a completely new Admin Page Design (CSS Edit).

This is the last version of Arabic Translation for 0.9.0.3 with slight modifications.

Hope that the moderator add this translation officially with other bbPress translations.

Arabic Support Forum: (part of my blog itkallem.com)

http://bbpress.itkallem.com/

Project @ Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/bbpressar/

Arabic Language Files ar_AR:

http://bbpressar.googlecode.com/files/ar_AR-0.9.0.3.zip

bbPress 0.9.0.3 Arabic Pack only (language files + RTl modifications,..etc)

http://bbpressar.googlecode.com/files/bbpress-arabicpack-0.9.0.3.zip

bbPress 0.9.0.3 Arabic Version (ready to use complete bbPress in Arabic version)

http://bbpressar.googlecode.com/files/bbpress-0.9.0.3-ar.zip

[+] Annoying Problems:

– unicode support for usernames

Thanks.

M.Abdel-Shakour.

[_ck_]

bbPress Plugin Index, N – Z

– N –

• New User Notification Email

– O –

• OpenID for bbPress

– P –

• Page links for bbPress
• Plugin browser for bbPress
• PollDaddy for bbPress
• Post Count
• Post Count Plus – Dynamic Titles, Colors & More!
• Post count titles for bbPress
• Post Edit Look Behind
• Private Forums
• Private Messaging

– Q –

• Quote

– R –

• Read-Only Forums
• reCAPTCHA for bbPress
• Recent Posts
• Related Topics
• Report Post
• Reputation (Karma) for bbPress
• Restrict registration for bbPress

– S –

• Show Top Posters
• Simple Google Adsense
• SMTP mailer for bbPress
• Sphere related content for bbPress
• Spoiler Tags
• Support Forum

– T –

• Temporary ban
• Terms of Service
• Textile
• Threaded posts
• Topic Icons
• Topics Per Page

– U –

• Unread Posts
• Unread Topics
• Use Display Name
• User Languages
• User Photo
• User Timezones
• Usernames I18N Fix

– W –

• Wiki Post
• WordPress Integration
• WP Search
• WP-CSS
• WPMU Enable bbPress Capabilities

– Y –

• Year Long Cookies – Remember Me

[chrishajer]

Looks like you’re close already. You need to do some CSS work in style.css for your bbPress template. Just take one thing at a time. It’s probably paths to images and things like that that need to be adjusted.

[chrishajer]

Also, before making changes to a stock template, you probably want to make a new directory called my-templates, then inside there a new directory called $whatever-you-want (maybe “forumtemplate” or “mytemplate” or “newlook”). Then inside that directory, copy over all the files and subdirectories from the bb-templates/kakumei/ directory. Now, in your new directory, edit the top of style.css to change the template name to something unique. Once you’ve done that, you can log in as keymaster, then select your new template, by name, since the screenshot will still look like kakumei since that’s what you copied over. Select the new template and look at your site. It should look the same as it did before, because you didn’t make any changes yet.

Now, confine all your changes to these template files, and if you break something you can always fall back on the default kakumei, or compare to see where you went wrong.

[chrishajer]

> – adding a banner to bbpress like that of my WP

Not sure what you mean there. If it’s navigation you need, you probably want integration with WordPress so you can use the WordPress functions like get_header and get_sidebar. If you mean just a banner ad of some sort, you can just add that to the template file header.php

> – changing the logo (I know, this should be simple)

It is. Just look in header.php for the header div, and style.css for the corresponding css.

> – containing bb within the main area of my WP pages

Not so easy. It doesn’t work well (or at all) in a WordPress page. It’s not a plugin for WordPress, it’s a standalone forum. If you want it to look like a WordPress page, you probably want integration as explained in item one above, or here.

> – adding a navigation button to return to my WP pages

> from bb

Also easy, like changing the logo. You can do it in header.php if you want the link up top. Or you can edit another template file if you want the link somewhere else.

[_ck_]

Very impressive.

Why not modify the CSS to match the blue links/text from your main site theme?

You can look at kakumei blue to see how easy it is to change from regular kakumei green theme to blue.

ps. I just updated Human Test to work with the BB-Anonymous-Posting plugin if that helps you too. Though sometimes it’s better to encourage people to at least register instantly rather than less manageable anonymous posting.

[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…

[kevinjohngallagher]

wow JohnJames, that is an excellent link and site.

I’m totally onbaord with the use of compliant tables for listing of tabular data. In terms of the topics, it’s 100% ideal, and done well by BBpress.

I also also totally agree that lists such as the forums, should be output to the screen as Definition lists with proper headings. Browsers wont know the difference (with the right CSS) and screen readers and search engines can better index. I might edit my example to do that tonight.

[John James Jacoby]

Screen readers and modified browsers might love lists, but they also love properly coded tables, of which most people really seem to do.

Google “everything you know about css is wrong” and check out how to style lists and div’s as tables, it’s an interesting read also. I don’t agree with it, but it is interesting.

The idea of a DIV is not to nest them, but to use them to DIVIDE content. The idea of a table is to compare data in a relational way. I think if you were going to use lists for forums, you would HAVE TO use DL’s and use dt’s for the headers at the very least, to provide a definition to the content being displayed.

I mean, I see how the argument goes both ways. (Off topic: If you’re really into accessibility, check out my WordPress section 508 theme at http://www.wp508.com? It’s not completely full of content yet, seems I have about 5 half finished projects right now ugh.)

[kevinjohngallagher]

Thanks mate,

it’s definately a work in progress. the plan of it was not to emulate the CODE of phpBB press, but instead to emulate how it looks. As you can see, the difference between having the positioning and CSS in before the TR / TD is worked out allows theme developer far more options.

And oddly, screen readers and modified browsers LOVE LOVE LOVE lists (ul/li, or dl/dt/dd). they have buttons to skip right past the ones you don’t want based on criteria and this means sifting through the parent/child heirarchy so much easier than tables. For tables screen readers (much like the DOM itself) skips line by line.

So on my website, if you chose Eurpoe, and the first forum was UK. with Nested divs and Lists you could hit next and go to Ireland. With tables you’d go to the next TR, which would be england, then london, then scotland etc.

I want to stress here 2 things,

1) i in no way want to turn bbpress into phpBB, i just figured i’d use it as an example win my layouts, because as bloated as it is, it actually does the nesting output really well.

2) I in no way want this singular issue to be the only thing we’re discussing here. It’s one of many examples where i think we’er going down a particular route.

Finally…@Ipstenu : “I can’t visualize something ‘less rigid’ than the current iteration of bbpress type forms, since tags gives you a rather light level of ‘org’. “

This is feel is the crux of the problem, as long as we have tags (which are great) we feel we’ve a fluid cross pollination forum going on. But if you take tags away for a sec (lets say the users didn’t put them in); then what your left with is 1 list of topics and 1 list of forums. That’s the definition of rigid.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Before i run off, I made this today:

http://www.kevinjohngallagher.com/___alpha/bbpress_as_phpbb/

Now, i’ve left $show_children=true, and added a crappy padding-left:20px to the CSS so that you can see the potential (though it totally looks crap).

The point of this is that 1) it works with existing plugins and 2) it doesn’t require plugins to work and 3) can be flicked back to the good old fashioned table stucture with a flick of a variable 9or removing the CSS padding).

The difference is that mine can be iterated through via the DOM and have the DOm understand the parent child relationship, and can be read successfully in the same way by a screen reader.

Also the HTML TAGS (in this case divs) for categories, parents, childs, siblings etc, are set up via a variable. So can be tables, divs or lists. All with the flick of a variable.

My point all along, has been, if we build something that can output one solution, then we’ll only ever meet the needs of that solution. If we build something that CAN meets the needs of many, then we meets the needs of the original (list all forums in a table) AND the needs of others.

P.S.

Anonymous posting is on, as is instant password if you want to register a fake account and have a wee look.

Now this is todays work, so dont expect too much, it’s merely a vehicle to show the potential.

EDIT: some of the forums are marked as hidden, so you may want to make an account. sorry, wanted to show it doesnt’ break forums and then went and hid one of the big ones. D’oh.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi _CK_,

Firstly, sorry about the gender thing (I blame going from French to English – to simplify I make everything masculine).

I’ve used the categories in 1.0alpha CK, and they do work wonders in the back end.

You make a number of really good points here, really good ones so if it’s cool I’ll go through them one by one.

It’s not just that I don’t “immediately see the solution” (though I admit I don’t), but lets run with that for a bit There is no documentation, there is no list of tags I can use and their features (e.g. https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags) which starts to make a lot of template development guesswork. Are we honestly at the stage of saying that any theme designer or developer out there now needs to be a PHP guru and also know BBpress inside and out to be able to produce a non-liner theme?

If we are, maybe, just maybe that why we’ve found it so hard to get people to use BBpress; and maybe that’s why almost all of the themes out there look the exactly same.

Heck, even when I did manage to code a solution, I found that so much of the template is NOT in the actual editable template but in the damned /bb-includes/template-fucntions.php file that I was close to giving up. (this btw is another example of how NOT theme developer friendly BBpress is – there is NO documentation on how to overwrite these functions in a theme, and I’m somewhat confident that it’ll need a plugin – which also can’t be distributed in a theme).

I totally understand and am impressed with BB1.0alpha’s understanding of categories and forums in a parent/child hierarchy. The backend totally seems to grasp them – and in fact I’ve used the ‘forum is categories’ plug-in with 0.9 and it worked really well (congratulations and thanks whoever developed it).

But you’ve hit on the crux of the problem with “the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet”.

This is the ‘mindset’ I was talking about originally. You’re coding and what you’ve given this community is amazing and without reproach, so hopefully you won’t mind me using you as en example.

What we’re doing is effectively plastering over the crack. We’re fixing the… visible bit of the problem (does that make sense in English, it’s a bit like “tip of the iceberg” thing which makes no sense in french). Let me hark back to your impressive Unread Posts plug-in (which is wonderful). Rather than actually say ok this FORUM or TOPIC that we’re iterating though has unread posts, you coded a plug-in that ONLY worked it out when building the CSS of the actual forum name. It’s like, shooting the small fish downstream and then having to constantly go back upstream when someone points out that the bigger fishes are still there.

People want Parent/Child? Sure we’ll make the change in the DB and admin.

People want Categories? Sure we’ll give it to them in the DB and admin.

People want to make changes to the template? Sure we’ll only work out if its’ a parent/child in the CSS because no-one has specifically asked us via a letter from the queen to give it to them in the $GLOBAL[‘forum’] variable 2 lines above. I mean, we COULD work it out before hand, but why would we do that, because then people could do what they wanted with the theme and CSS – heck they wouldn’t be stuck to using tables in a linear fashion and… oh, no, wait…

It’s… fire fighting, it’s fixing the visible bit of the problem without actually tackling WHY people might have spotted the issue. It’s not a complaint, truly it’s not, the coding that’s been done is wonderful and I’m always impressed by it; but the mindset the thought process behind these features, isn’t wide enough.

You yourself can see how scarce this and bbshowcase forums are, it’s hardly a bustling thriving community. If we’re honestly waiting for someone to specifically come and ask for processing to be done at the earliest stage possible and not just at the CSS level then we may be waiting a long while.

I appreciate that it’s “Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like” for someone of your obvious expertise, but not everyone in the community could do that. And while I think I could make a decent stab at it, not everyone here could, and certainly not everyone who could design/develop a theme could. Not to mention that as a THEME we’d need to specify plugins that need to be installed at the same time. Surely the good developers here at BBpress can see that’s not how a THEME works in wordpress.

What we’re effectively doing is adding a double step. We’re saying that to be a theme developer, you need to be able to code PHP plugins and be able to read, sift, assume and work out all the relevant tags/functions/classes/object without any documentation. That’s a massive massive assumption. Which is what my original mindset point was – we’ve effectively built a piece of software that’s really good for us the “open source loving / developing / community” but not good for the average user/owner.

BBpress has so much potential, and whether people in the community think that my particular examples are valid or not (we are all entitled to our opinion), surely we can all agree on certain points:

Making BBpress website structure and look fit into a more wordpress.org format will help people stick around:

Increasing the documentation will make things a lot easier.

Not presuming that template developers are PHP wizards.

Making the structure of the core files match WordPress more.

I, like all of you, want BBpress to be better. But right now we’re going down one path, and the more we go down it, the harder it will be to allow people to take their BBpress forum in it’s own direction.

[kevinjohngallagher]

2 wonderful replies. Excellent to have a frank discussion like this.

I’ll deal with them separately if that’s ok?

@Johnjames

I do love that BBpress allows the owner to specify how much of what type of emphasis can be placed on what area of the discussion, or to add/remove features based on plug-ins. I’m all for that.

What I’m saying is, that the way we currently handle things, and the way we currently build things actually negates that. If you want a hierarchal system, you can’t have it. Categories are just forums. We don’t iterate though levels to produce our structure where Forums belong to Categories. Because Categories are just forums with an extra DB mark, there’s no ownership.

(yes at the back end we can set the parent/child relationship up, but at the front end we don’t have access to that information).

Infact, from a template perspective, we only access the information about the forum’s relationship with those around it (parent, child, sibling, uncle, nephew) when we work out the CSS – AFTER the table has been created. This entirely nullifies the option to handle a feudal system with controllable Parent / Child options for the owner / theme developer.

(the call to the BBloop->classes() that works it out only returns a string of CSS classes instead of an object we can use to work things out ourselves).

As someone who deals with accessible websites a lot, I can tell you that outputting tables for a list of the topics is great. Outputting a flat table with different CSS (that gets stripped by the screen reader) for a hierarchal parent/child relationship is totally pointless. Going the other way, for our more fancy theme developers, it really messes up JavaScript iterating and controlling the DOM; and also starts to cause real issues with CSS layouts on older /non-standard compliant browsers.

(ever wonder why all the BBpress themes all look really really similar)

My point is, if I want to go with the flat list of topics as many do, then BBpress lets me, which is ace. If I don’t though, then BBpress starts to cause me huge issues. I’m all for owners being able to choose to do as much or as little as they want with BBpress – but right now, with the current set up, choosing to emulate the basic STRUCTURE of the bigger boards simply isn’t an option.

Yes we can do it in the back end (categories > forums > forum > forum > topic) but we cant do it in the front end; because we don’t iterate through the parent/child relationships like we would say… an xml file, instead we just list all the cats/forums.

To keep with your Pizza analogy, if you said “What do you want on your pizza” and I said “tomato, and give me a coke and fries too” – but when I get the pizza delivered the fries are on a coke drenched pizza. Oh what, you didn’t want it all mushed together in a single item? SWOwman, sorry, what you meant to say was:

Pizza

– Tomato Sauce

– Cheese

– Pepperoni

Drink

– Coke

Side order

– Fries

Shit man, we just mush all that stuff together with no differentiation until it’s output (see we’ve slapped the coke label on the side for you).

Basically, having a standard output that is rigid doesn’t make us more robust, it makes us less flexible. And that, as you have pointed out JohnJames, is one of the joys of BBpress. It’s flexible in so many ways – just not this one.

(and this is just one example)

[kevinjohngallagher]

Indeed JohnJames, you are right on many of your points (if not all).

I think we should do more to compliment where we’re similar to WordPress with BBpress. The code structure and website are two key issues, and i’ve mentioned a few more up above (trying not to be too boring and repeat myself).

Your points of the cross-polination ability of BBpress, by allowing topics to be tagged by multiple keywords, is 100% valid. It’s situational ofcourse, but i can see why it’s well liked.

My point was more… what do the end users think/want? If we say that we think all end users want little drilling down of categories or parent/child nodes, but instead to sift through tags that anotehr user might or might not have put on their post, then we are paramount to saying that every other piece of forum software has it wrong for the past 10 years. Thats quite massive.

I’m really glad I found BBpress, i’m glad to find such great developers and a good open community, but the more I see where we’re going the less flexible to other approaches we appear to be.

I mean, the BBpress core has a parent child hierarchy for forums, but doesn’t actually differentiate the outputted code apart form CSS. It basically treats it as a flat list. Surely, it’s clear that this hampers our theme developers. Because, lets be a little blunt here, they do all look somewhat similar.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Well, there’s no good way of putting this without making it look like i’m flogging my own dead horse, but here goes:

Can someone tell me why we’re working out vital data in regards to each forum on as CSS links?

Why on Earth don’t we work out each attribute at the start of the loop, and then feed off an object, giving our template developers and therefore users far more options?

As it stands, we call bb_forum_class(); inside the TR, which then creates the $bb_forums_loop object; which calls classes();, and that works out all the attributes of the forum, but rather than sending them back as a usable object the whole thing returns a string of CSS code.

Why not allow template developers access to:

$bb_forums_loop->first_child

$bb_forums_loop->last_child

$bb_forums_loop->bb_root

etc?

I mean, the code itself if great, and the job you’ve done is really good, but it fixes one singular issue (getting the right CSS output), rather than fixing the bigger problem of not knowing all attributes of the forum. Not only does it lead to very messy templates (if someone can be bothered to deal with it – and i’ve not seen a template that has yet), but it does indeed duplicate alot of the work.

[kevinjohngallagher]

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

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

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

Category

– Forum

– Forum

– – Forum

– – Forum

– Forum

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

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

Thanks for the help folks

EDIT:

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

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

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

Thanks alot for all the help

[glenncvance]

Hello everybody – I’m having a formatting issue with bbpress and IE7. You can see an example of what my problem is here –

http://wrvna.org/forum/topic.php?id=9

In FF, naturally, everything works fine, but IE7 puts the username and status underneath/inside/within the topic post. I’m using a stripped down (even further) version of the 1col_fixed

theme.

I’ve searched the forum here and can’t find anyone else with this problem. My fear is that it’s a IE7 CSS problem….

Thanks.

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

Did you figure it out?

Look at the front-page.php to see where the table row tags are output to see which CSS class is assigned to that tr element…

[chrishajer]

To post source code here, just use the backtick (upper left on a US keyboard, under the tilde) before and after your block of code.

I noticed in your forum source there is a link to this style.css which does not exist:

http://www.addiva.net/bbpress/style.css

Not sure if that’s a problem or not, but it’s not right. In addition, you should validate your CSS here and fix any problems.

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator

I would start with those things and maybe something will stand out.

[_ck_]

Very nice work.

Demo:

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

don’t forget to add the info at the top of style.css

/*

Theme Name: WP Mimic

Theme URI: http://idolsavenue.com/forums/topic.php?id=1

Description: This theme is called "WP Mimic" because it is structured after the current themes of WordPress (.com and .org) forums.

Version: 0.02

Author: limited

Author URI: http://idolsavenue.com/forums/

*/

and make a proper screenshot