[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

[leoleoleo]

Thanks!

Where to add the css id to front-page.php?

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

My theme (kakumei blue) uses this in the style.css:

tr.bb-category td {

background-color: #ddd;

}

[rensenieuwenhuis]

forum: http://www.rensenieuwenhuis.nl/r-forum/

blog: http://www.rensenieuwenhuis.nl

New forum on R-Project and statistics in general, based on BBPress 1.0 alpha-2I didn’t change much to the original code (other than some minor tinkering on the CSS).

Plugins:

• Support Forum
• Unread Posts
• Post notification
• Moderator post notification
• Google adsense
• Akismet

Also use BBpress Live to mirror on my blog what’s going on at the forums. Finally, the forum is accessible through a ‘page’ on my blog: http://www.rensenieuwenhuis.nl.

In the future, I plan to use BBpress Live to send a selection of my blog-posts to a subforum.

[Vietson]

Its my first time using bbPress and first time theming it. I must say, the easiest forum to theme I’ve ever come across.

I mimic WordPress (.com and .org) forums layout structure and color palette. Still working to iron out some css issue.

I wanted to update jquery to the current latest but it broke a few things. So I’m currently writing a plug-in that will hopefully update the jQuery and fixes the few broken items.

BBCode Lite,

BBCode Button

Allow Image

BB Smilies (maybe I should change this to something better)

BB Video

Askimet

TOS (Terms of Service)

Demo: http://idolsavenue.com/forums/

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

Sorry. I didn’t want to hijack the guy’s thread… I’ll keep it focused from now. Thanks.

[_ck_]

I really wish people would just post in the extend area for each plugin directly. All these fractions of questions and answers all over the forum makes it impossible for the next person to find it .

The span technique should be fine, I just didn’t do it that way because it’s just about as much code to put an image in the foreground that way than the background.

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

Um, hold on. I can’t seem to replicate this… strange.

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

Plugin: _ck_’s Hidden Forum v.0.0.4*

I did this:

//$hidden_forums['label']="[H] ";

$hidden_forums['label']="<span id='shield'>&nbsp;</span>";

so that I could use a background image. The ugly thing with this is that you see span blah blah as the browser title…

Is there a better way to do this?

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

Works for me.

bbPress 1.0a2 and plugin v.0.0.4*

Didn’t bother me before (just deleted double H’s) but this is progress!

Um, _ck_, while you’re looking at that file…peek at another minor thing

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

I’ll download and push the filebase again, just for laughs…

haha, sigh. It helps if I push the right version! Ok, it’s still 1.0 alpha 2 and it’s still refusing to add the forum. The CSS is ‘messed up’ for the form but that shouldn’t stop it, right? Naaah.

Oh look, another straw…

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

Just to be clear, guys: I’m working on a WP2.6.2 site, not the WPMu version…

@eagano: I hear you man. I did as you suggested and I made sure /wp-admin/options.php matched as well.

I’m using FF3 and the error console shows only warnings generated by the theme’s CSS (doesn’t like the asterisk in declarations: Kakumei 0.01 theta-beta by Bryan Veloso)

I’m not using Google Gears to cache anything.

@Ipstenu: I linked to the cookiefix in the first post. Now that you both pointed out that it’s a WPMu-specific fix I have removed it from the WP code. Did you mean a link to the test site?

I appreciate you looking into this.

Is there some sort of trace I can place on the submit button? A setting I can toggle to make it/something verbose?

Cheers.

[chrishajer]

Yes, please keep your modifications restricted to files in the template folder. If you think you need to modify something outside that folder, it’s probably already possible with a plugin. If it’s not possible with a plugin, you’re getting into modifying the bbPress core, which is a very bad idea for keeping up with new releases.

I recommend copying all the stock theme files over to a new theme and then modify those files. That way, you can always refer back to the original if you break something, or you can even revert to the stock theme if you really break something.

https://bbpress.org/documentation/themes/

Or this more recent explanation:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/deleting-allowed-markup-info-below-posting-field#post-19960

[chrishajer]

I recommend the web developer toolbar add on for Firefox. It will let you change font sizes and colors on the fly temporarily, then, when you’re done, you can make those changes permanent in your style.css.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Regarding the display of items on your forum, either to add to them or remove from them, I usually search through the files in my template folder for a specific piece of text that’s being displayed. Normally, that shows you right where the template is generating that, and you can either remove it or add to it there. That’s a start.

[chrishajer]

No.

Kakumei is a theme (WordPress terminology) or a template (bbPress terminology) and controls the display of the content on your site. Any modifications you make to your site should be done in these template files, never in the core. Changing core files makes it hard to upgrade to newer releases: you lose your changes with every upgrade. So, if you make the changes in a template file, you can maintain them between releases.

Also, by default, the stock kakumei theme is used and it’s in the bb-templates directory. I recommend creating a new directory called my-templates (if it’s not there already) at the same level as bb-templates. So, in a directory listing, they’d be at the same level. Then, inside there, create a directory called mytheme or some other name that is descriptive for your forum. This directory name does not matter. (The my-templates one DOES matter.)

Now that you have a my-templates directory, and inside that a new directory with a name you choose, copy everything from inside the bb-templates/kakumei/ directory to this new directory you created. Then, open up style.css and change the header to give this new template a unique name on line two. You will see this there:

Theme Name: Kakumei

Change that to “Theme Name: My Cool New Theme” or whatever you want. Then refresh your admin panel, and you will see a new theme. You can change the rest of the lines in that header as well, to things that are meaningful to you. Be sure not to modify the text before the colon, just change the text after, to your values.

Now, modify the php and css files in this directory to change the look of your forum. You can switch back and forth between themes here. If you break something, just choose the default theme until you fix the one you were working on.

[epiphone]

Well I’ve finally done it, Intergrated my WP blog theme with bbPress. It’s not as hard as you think once you look around. Anyway check out my intergration here:

http://www.james-blogs.com (blog)

http://www.james-blogs.com/forum (forum)

(There are still 1 or two minor CSS errors but the intergration of WordPress functions has been done successfully.

It’s taken me a few days to figure it all out, but I’ve finally done it. Although it does sound like im bragging alot. I also want to share a website that could also help you do theme intergration:

http://bbpressraw.com/bbpress_blank_themes/

This site provides blank themes that are literally the bare minimum of CSS, but even better they provide blank themes in type so for example my blog layout is a 2 Column design. I would also find this layout on bbpressraw.com and then begin editing it.

Being able to get a pre-coded layout with the bare minimum needed within it, certainly helped me alot. And I was able to understand and modify to intergrate my blog theme into it.

I hope this website can help you to in intergrating your bbPress installation

[agitainment]

Hi.

I recently installed bbPress on my WordPress site here at http://agitainment.com/ics/forum/.

I’ve built a theme based on 1col_fixed 1.1 (I believe it’s kakumei with most of the CSS stripped out). In any case, when I go to my forums I can see my Gravatars and default avatars in kakumei, but when I switch on my theme they disappear.

Is there a php file I’m missing or a block of code somewhere I need to copy over from the kakumei theme to get these to work? If so, where should I put the code?

Thanks!