[childofnewlight]

After having exhaustively searched for the last few nights for information on this topic, I have not been able to find an answer.

I’m currently using the most up-to-date versions of both WP and bbPress. My current website uses Joomla, rokbridge, and phpbb3.

However, I’m trying to setup a new site based on WordPress and bbPress seems like an awesome alternative to having to mess around with forum bridges for phpbb3.

I was well on my way to adopting bbPress as our new forum software. Successfully imported the phpbb forum. Just fixing things up after the import like setting categories and moving forums around into their proper place. Then I realized that private forums were now public.

‘No problem’, I though. I went to each forum settings to be amazingly disappointed that there was only three options: hidden, private, and open.

With our current phpbb setup I can create a group. Add people to it. Then go to the forum (or their group) and give them permission to see the group.

This is especially important as we are a Christian gaming clan. We have a private guild forum that allows members of our clan to discuss things privately amongst each other (like private vent login info). We also have an officer forum that lets us candidly discuss potential applicants.

I would like to allow officers access to certain forums. Guild members to certain other forums. As far as I can tell, bbpress excludes this very basic ability.

I tried using the Members plugin for WordPress that is suppose to have bbpress integration. It wouldn’t work properly. At times it wouldn’t allow a role to see certain forums and other times it didn’t matter what permissions were set, it’d see it anyway.

I’m going to look at support for the Members mod, but it seems kind of silly that this wouldn’t be an integral part of a modern forum software.

Unless I’m missing something, I’ll have to stick with messing around with phpbb for now.

[Tanya]

This is my netball forum, migrated to bbPress from phpbb:

Latest

The import sort of mucked up, so I have a few odd Anonymous users here and there that I have been having to change in the database, but no other problems otherwise.

We designed it to fit into our website as much as possible. Our website is an online digital netball magazine, with the latest netball news and netball forum too.

Thanks @netweb for your help!

[akgt]

or if i could get some easy instructions.

 

[akgt]

Hi could someone give me a updated theme, I dont know css, a pain I know .

[zilveer]

@lynq:
Can you please give a big printscreen of this theme, since I want to see it before I install it.

[jpanizzoli]

That did it! Thanks so much! I thought the ‘Table Prefix’ was the subfolder / slug name you wanted for your forum. In the docs I read it provided a table prefix for PHPBB, but I didn’t see one for bbPress1. Glad that was easy 😉

[Lynq]

Yes, sorry I was originally using drupal for EpicWebs.co.uk and I didn’t get on with it very well for what is essentially a blog, so I am redoing it in wordpress.

The best link is github: https://github.com/EpicWebs/bbPress-starter-theme-epicwebs

[zilveer]

The links doesnt work for me.
Can you please paste the working ones here?

[akgt]

Turns out i was installing in the wrong place,

I’ve just installed on bp 1.7beta & bbpres and it works.

[akgt]

Im looking for a option to able to add a Unread Posts icons to each topic like in phpbb and mybb.

[akgt]

I hadd the following error installing on wp 3.5 and buddypress 1.7 The package could not be installed. The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet.

[Stephen Edgar]

Thanks for feedback @beggers, glad its worked for you 🙂

The forum order is already fixed for upcoming bbPress 2.3 with lots of extra tweaks also… storing old phpBB user profile fields.. ‘all the BBCodes’ are converted bbPress HTML…

[Bryan Eggers]

I just imported a phpBB forum of 2000 members and 100,000 posts.  I was getting an error that MySQL died so I changed a couple of settings in my.cnf to keep the connection alive.  You can also change the default wait time in the importer from 1 to 3 to give everything time to catch up.

Unfortunately, the forums get imported in seemingly random order so you’ll have to edit each forum and use the Order field to display them properly.

If you’ve already run the importer once, check to see if you’ve already imported the members.  Clearing the previous attempt doesn’t clear the members you imported, only the forum data.  So if you run the entire import again you’ll get duplicate usernames (like Joe and ImportedJoe) and all the forum links will be wrong.  I used a plugin in that lets you mass delete members, and then started over from scratch.  Honestly, it took me several times to get it right.

[Bryan Eggers]

I recently installed Buddypress and BBpress and was thinking about how I could add all the nifty features of phpBB such as BBcodes and stuff.  Then I remembered that hardly anyone uses most of them and here’s a big reality check – Facebook doesn’t even let you use bold or italic and they have a BILLION users.

Bottom line – don’t waste time adding a bunch of stuff that you think might be cool but actually have little or no effect on activity.

[akgt]

I just want it look and  have  the features of Mybb/Phpbb

[shauntwl]

sorry i dont understand, i did a full wordpress installation and installed bbpress plugin. Hostgator installed wordpress on my sever for me.

is that not a full wordpress setup?

[Lynq]

Sounds like your main theme (not a bbpress theme) doesn’t have all the files it needs, I would recommend getting a full working installation of wordpress first, check everything is ok then do the bbPress stuff.

[shauntwl]

hi, i really need help. i am very new to wordpress and bbpress. i installed wordpress today and installed bbpress.

i did downloaded your theme and placed it in wp-content/themes/my-theme

in wordpress -> Appearance -> Themes. it says

“Broken Themes

The following themes are installed but incomplete. Themes must have a stylesheet and a template.
Name Description
my-theme Stylesheet is missing.”

my test site is http://therightclique.sg/jeepforum/forums/
can anyone guild me to create a proper working forum?

[Lynq]

@golfer300 You will need to put the contents of the zip file inside your theme folder, once you have done this you should see a bbpress-functions.php inside your main theme directory. For this theme to fully work you will need to have the wordpress classes attached to the body tag.

@akgt I haven’t tested it using buddyPress, let me know if you use it.

[Stephen Edgar]

Good idea re: resyncing the database. I don’t think this DB was maintained properly and upgrading from phpbb 2.x to 3.0.11 may have introduced some errors.

Does phpBB now have your “50K+” posts after the repair or still ~27K?

Unfortunately, the outcomes were all the same. the import seemed to hang, although it did get further this time (converting forums 100 – 199)

You only had ~10-15 phpBB forums when I looked earlier and it now looks like you have removed phpBB from your site so I can no longer confirm this.

The last message you should have seen during the import ‘forums’ step should have been `(converting forums 0 – 99)` before it moved onto the next step `Calculating forum hierarchy (0 – 99)`.

I used the stop/start suggestion, let it run for an hour, and it seemed that everything was imported.

Why do you presume that? Did you see your 50K+ posts somewhere?

Then when you go to view a forum or category or topic, and most of it is missing. Most recent posts were from 2004.

I stated in my previous post any counts you see before running the repair tools will be inaccurate.

This was before running any repairs. Running the repair functions depleted the counts further.

I’ll reiterate this again, any counts you see before running the repair tools after the import is finished are inaccurate and should not be relied upon.

The repair tools nor any part of bbPress will delete content from your WordPress database unless you explicitly do this via ‘forum reset’ or ‘purge previous import’.

I’m not sure I can troubleshoot this in time for my client’s deadline but if further suggestions or upgrades come up, I’m game for trying them out in the future.

At this stage yours is the ONLY phpBB forum that has NOT been successfully imported, there are virtually no future upgrades planned for the phpBB importer because they are not needed as it has thus far worked with every single phpBB import that I have been asked to test or help out with.

The output of the converter should be similar to this (They should match your phpBB stats to the nearest 100)
Did the import end up looking like this below? If not which step did it stop at?
`
Repair any missing information: Continue
Conversion Complete
Converting replies (2000 – 2099)
…
Converting replies (100 – 199)
Converting replies (0 – 99)
Converting topics (1200 – 1299)
…
Converting topics (200 – 299)
Converting topics (100 – 199)
Converting topics (0 – 99)
Calculating forum hierarchy (0 – 99)
Converting forums (0 – 99)
No data to clean
Starting Conversion
`

As I stated in the comments of the review you posted for the bbPress plugin at WordPress.org I am more than happy to take a look and help you get it imported.

If there is a bug with the importer and why your phpBB is not playing nice like all the other phpBB forum imports I can write a patch to fix it but I will need accurate detailed information from you to do this.

Cheers,

Stephen

[sdocpublishing]

Good idea re: resyncing the database. I don’t think this DB was maintained properly and upgrading from phpbb 2.x to 3.0.11 may have introduced some errors.

Unfortunately, the outcomes were all the same. the import seemed to hang, although it did get further this time (converting forums 100 – 199), I used the stop/start suggestion, let it run for an hour, and it seemed that everything was imported. Then when you go to view a forum or category or topic, and most of it is missing. Most recent posts were from 2004. This was before running any repairs. Running the repair functions depleted the counts further.

I’m not sure I can troubleshoot this in time for my client’s deadline but if further suggestions or upgrades come up, I’m game for trying them out in the future.

[akgt]

can this theme be used with buddypress 1.7  groups forum ?

[Stephen Edgar]

Cool…. Lets start fresh and see what happens….

Firstly make sure phpBB is running smoothly…

You state that phpBB has ‘1400 users and at least 50K posts’ though the phpBB forum itself states ‘Total posts 26878, Total topics 3468 & Total members 1263’ so there could be some issues with your actual phpBB install and/or database.

Run these checks which should clear up any potential database issues with phpBB from the phpBB admin tools (ACP) /phpbbv3/adm/index.php

• Resynchronise statistics
• Resynchronise post counts
• Resynchronise dotted topics

Now resync all of the phpBB forums which again should clear up any phpBB issues and in particular any issues for when bbPress starts to ‘calculating board hierarchy’

• Click the ‘Forums’ tab in phpBB ACP
• You should now see a list of category/parent forums
• For each one of these over to the right is an option to ‘resynchronize’ the forum
• Do this for each of the category/parent forums then drill down through each of those to any child forums and do the same for each

That should take care of any phpBB database issues…

Now go and try the import again with the same settings you have used previously but also check the following two options.

• Start Over – Start a fresh conversion from the beginning
• Purge Previous Import – Purge all information from a previously attempted import

If you believe the importer starts to hang at any point and is not moving along simply click ‘stop’ to pause the import process and give your webhost a bit of time to catch up on any other tasks that might be running and click ‘start’ to resume the import.

Don’t run any of the repair tools whilst the importer is importing and wait until the import has completed before running each of the tools individually.

So how did it go?

[sdocpublishing]

Hi Stephen–
I’m taking you up on your invite to talk about phpBB imports.
In advance of upgrading a client’s site from (very VERY outdated WP and phpBB) I created a sandbox with WP 3.5.1 and phpBB 3.
There’s not a whole lot here, as I’m just using it to find the best way to integrate the bulletin board w/ the WP site, so the BB can be access-controlled for paid members.
Site: sdocplayground.com/wordpress
Imported forum: http://sdocplayground.com/wordpress/index.php/forums/
bbPress v 2.3 beta 2
Theme = twenty twelve
The phpBB install has about 1400 users and at least 50K posts and was created in mid-2004. My client wants to keep *everything*.

Here’s what happens when I run the import:
Default settings are left alone (pause after 100 lines, 1 second between, etc
All users are imported seamlessly.
When the import process gets to “calculating board hierarchy”, it hangs. I let the import run for an hour then check the results in the “forum” admin tab.
It appears that all of the posts have been imported. (The numbers in each of the categories is right.) But when you try to visit any of the forums/categories, they’re empty.
So then I run the “repair” functions one by one. Now it seems that most of the posts are gone and the most recent are from 2004. (Most recent should be from 11/2012). Some posts are visible but there are no responses where they should be.

Am I missing a step, or is some setting not correct, or is the beta version of the plugin just not doing what I need it to do? I would love to have all of my site’s content in one interface but I can’t find where the content goes. What am I missing?

[Secretmapper]

Hello. I was reviewing free php forums and came upon bbPress. I have had great experiences with WordPress, so the idea of a “wordpressy” forum got me.

However, I just want to know from you guys is it good? If I understand correctly bbPress is quite new, so can you say it can compete with, say, phpBB?

Also, I am planning to integrate a LOT of features for my forum, as I am aiming to make a roleplaying forum, with characters, and weapons and all that jazz. Would bbPress make it easy for me to do those? For any of you have created plugins for bbPress, how developer-friendly do you think it is?

Here I am, hoping for your replies. Thank you.