@Ipstenu – It’s not the glitter and unicorns that make a site hard to convert, but best practices 
If you designed your website with good XHTML etc, it’s a simple matter (a weekend at most) to convert it to WordPress or bbPress or BuddyPress.
That was just my attempt at humor.
We where able to integrate BB into our WP theme is about 30min. Although restyling everything is still ongoing, but that’s not a issue with BB (although more themes would be great). With the WP header/footer there is some issues with BB plugins that require javascript, but we are working around that.
The issue I have with “integration” is that WP should be able to call info BB and vice versa. That’s it.
The other issue I have is that v1.0 more or less killed all the developments that came before it.
I think BB is great and I wouldn’t be spending my time here if I didn’t. After solving a major issue with converting our old phpbb forum we have decided to push forward with bbPress.
So now I’m off to figure out how to call up Bavatars in the post.php file. If I have time after that I will try and get that BB welcome/login message in the header working.
It looks hot!
maybe at least a month – as target release?
I was planning on moving from phpbb3 to bbPress 1.0
but maybe it will be better to wait now …
DennisH, it sounds to me like you want BuddyPress + bbPress + WordPress. If you’re not using all three, then you’re really not going to get what you want.
Also, if phpBB just has too MANY features, you could trim some of phpBB’s code out, no different than you can add code to any *Press product.
It also is a relatively new concept (Within 1 year) of having all of these platforms working in unison together. BuddyPress has taken giant strides towards providing a personality to the users on your site, to give your bbPress users profiles and information beyond the basics.
Regarding the “promise” of integration, it’s possible to do within a few minutes, with integrated logins, profile info, etc… The major difference is that you can’t expect it to look like a typical forum is going to look, at least not at its current stage of development.
When you consider that phpBB is 3.0.5, and it stayed in the 2.0 branch for over 7 years, apply that logic to bbPress that JUST turned 1.0 a month ago… There’s still LOTS that can be done, but for now bbPress is a stable and powerful product that is a developers dream platform for forum software to start with. You can mold and shape it to handle just about any task (wait until you see what BuddyPress is going to do with it 
)
Long story short, I’m sorry you’re disappointed at the moment, but I’m willing to bet you won’t always be. If you need something besides bbPress right now, no one’s feelings are hurt, but my suggestion to you would be to make friendly with it now so you can be better prepared to use it later, when it better meets your expectations.
I’m talking about having to hack almost every bbpress php file to include the wp header and footer or having to hack the config files.
Deep Integration worked nearly out of the box for me on BuddyPress. I don’t do it on WP because really I don’t need it when I can easily reproduce my theme for bbPress. But still, no hacks were needed, just a tweak of the bb-config.php and some jiggering of a theme. Took me all of an afternoon.
As far as Avatars I’m using the wp-united on the live site (phpbb avatars). For BB I have not found a solution yet that will work or integrate into both BB and WP.
Gravatar works fine.
At this point I’ll take 1 out of 3.
I’m not talking about plugins. I’m talking about having to hack almost every bbpress php file to include the wp header and footer or having to hack the config files.
The phpbb solution at the time (a year ago)was a HUGE F@#*ING HACK, but now that phpbb has a automod (or whatever they are calling it) it’s basically as easy as a plugin.
I’m not looking for the login form (I’m building a lightbox for that), I’m talking about:
“Welcome, _ck_ ! View your profile (Admin | Log Out) 5 New Private Messages”
As far as Avatars I’m using the wp-united on the live site (phpbb avatars). For BB I have not found a solution yet that will work or integrate into both BB and WP.
“Easy integration with your blog” <- if that’s the biggest problem you have with what bbpress promises, you are doing great. I actually have a problem with two of the three words in the upper right hand corner of every page on bbpress.org due to 1.0
Why is it hard to put a bbpress login box in wp? Pull up the bbpress login page in your browser, view the source and copy everything between <form... </form> and paste it into WP wherever you’d like and add a little bit of PHP code to detect if the user is logged in or not to offer them the form. 10 minutes tops.
What are you using now for avatars in WP?
Plugins are not hacks. Hacks are when you hack the core.
Is the phpbb solution a clean copy of phpbb with plugins or is it’s core heavily hacked, hence cannot keep up with upgrades/security fixes easily?
Buddypress group forums run on bbpress. Besides, wp-united hooks into more than the user table.
I would hope that Automattic would at the very least see where there is user demand and make some effort to fulfill that demand. After all it’s their users a developers that are responsible for their huge success. I guess I can understand them feeling that we give you the software for free so you shouldn’t complain, but those users/developers create, extend, promote and for the most part supply customers service for them.
Nevertheless, statements like this can lead to the wrong impression:
Easy integration with your blog
WordPress and bbPress are siblings, and they get along together a lot better than you and your brother did when you were kids!
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Just look at your tags.
We have been able to pull off much of what I described here. We have integrated bbpress into our theme. We have converted phpbb forums posts and users and have integrated them. We have been able to list new posts in WP. We have been able to do about 75% of what we need so far. Avatars are still a issue. And I can’t see why it’s so hard to put a bbpress login box in WP.
So its not that much of this can’t be done. I just fear with so many hacks it could be trouble down the road.
As far as I know, bbPress adds no special abilities or requirements to BuddyPress, it’s simply able to use the usertable directly, so you in theory should be able to use your phpbb solution with BuddyPress too.
You have to understand bbPress was never designed originally to deeply integrate into WordPress, only use the user-table. Deep integration was an afterthought – years after it was originally released and a mish-mash of legacy was established. Matt had a 180 degree turnaround on that process with bbPress 1.0 being rewritten to use BackPress instead. If WordPress ever is redesigned to use BackPress itself (don’t hold your breath, it could be years) deep integration could be even easier and much lighter weight.
I’m not saying this to be mean or unfair, but very simply, if you don’t like something you see in bbPress 1.0, don’t adopt it now thinking it will change sometime soon, it won’t and you’ll only be very disappointed. bbPress development is quite obviously NOT developed around user requests, it’s developed around Automattic requirements. It’s the exact same thing for WordPress and nothing new policy-wise. Everything else is left to plugin developers.
That said, I would stop using bbPress in heartbeat if they started throwing in many of the features that people are demanding be included as built in. I already have a big enough problem with many of the hardcoded “features” already.
@_ck_: So are you using that phpbb3 integration?
If it works so well, I am curious why you are here?
It does work well.
There are several reasons I’m here.
First, although it has been recently taken over and updated that mod was abandoned for over a year by its creator . During the period it was MIA we where locked in and it was very had to upgrade to new versions of WordPress. It wasn’t compatible with 2.6. All that has changed recently and upgrading and installing is much easier. But, even though it is “under new management” I didn’t want to be held hostage by one developer.
Second, I wanted a lighter site. Phpbb is great but it can be overkill sometimes.
Third, at some point in the future we want to move to Buddypress. I thought moving to bbpress would get us ready for that next step.
Forth, we are adding about 500 new members each month so if we where unable to move those users and posts it was better to start over now rather than later.
Fifth, Although phpbb was well integrated in terms of users and themes there was still a sense of 2 different sites. I was hoping that because bbpress was made by the same people as WP we could better integrate both style and function.
I knew going into this that WP-United was currently a better option, but I was willing to overlook those smaller details in order to be with a platform that would grow with us. Now my fear is that bbpress will grow in the wrong direction (if at all).
PS
I want to thank you personally. Your contributions are a main reason we decided to give this a try… and continue to try.
PSS
The reason I bring up WP-Untied is not because I want people to drop bbpress for phpbb. I bring it up as and example of what bbpress could be or at least inspiration for new plugins.
Thanks. Sorry, that was my typo.
I have ‘define( ‘BB_LANG’, ‘ja’);’. The language files are installed and they are recognized.
I am trying to build in dual language support for the 1.0.1.
Its seems that neither bbPress Language Switcher by _ck_ nor User Languages by alex work on v.1.
Does anyone know if there is a work around for this?
Manually, I can define either, say, ‘ja’ or ‘en_US’ … but it does not seem possible to do any switching at all, either via user admin or Switcher bar.
I really am sorry to discover this as I was looking for dual language WordPress/bbPress integration and to be free of the bloated phpBB for ever.
Thank you.
I confirm that after converting from phpbb 3.0.4 to bbpres 1.0.1 the user passwords don`t work anymore..
So are you using that phpbb3 integration?
If it works so well, I am curious why you are here?
I got the following error when converting:
General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]
Data too long for column ‘post_text’ at row 1 [1406]
An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.
I solved this issue. It was the © symbol in some of the posts causing the error.
Another question: any ideas on redirecting perm links from the old phpbb to bbpress?
I’m sorry but sometimes less is just less. I looked forward to having a lite integrated forum, but it doesn’t look like bbPress is ready for that.
Saying bbPress can be integrated with WordPress is like saying your seat can be used as a flotation device.
The fact this site isn’t integrated should have been a tip off.
If you are looking for anything beyond just cookie integration good night and good luck.
Sure, theme integration can be done via some costly hacks, but its the simple stuff that has my head spinning. Something simple like a bbPress login box in WordPress is more complicated and less likely than Mideast peace.
I just don’t get it….
It seems like all the “social cms” resources and ideas are being put into Buddypress. Can’t we have some of those basic features in the single WP install?
WP-United for phpbb has these features. Why is it so hard for bbPress?
Don’t get me wrong, the people supporting BB here in this forum are great. Problem is there just are not enough of them to fill in the big gaps created at inception.
Sorry for the rant. I still would love to use bbPress, I hope one day soon they will fulfill its promise. Until then:
http://www.wp-united.com/features/
That would be painful because you would have to create topic slugs manually for anything coming in from phpbb/vanilla
You should be able to pull this off, but as far as I know there is no Vanilla to bbPress converter.
However, the phpBB to bbPress converter works well. Since phpBB is quite popular, you should be able to convert from Vanilla to phpBB to bbPress.
There is a tutorial here http://portfolio.sticktacular.com/resource.php?creation=219
that allows you to tie up PhpBB forums user system, to your own website, and use theres sessions etc.
Can I do that with bbPress and if so would i have to make my site inside the bbpress folder.
thanks alot, im an amature with php, but i know the basics of oop and mysql etc. etc.
regards,
enatom.
Thank you for the info, it was very helpful!
@chrishajer – I checked my .htaccess file, and the permissions were incorrect, II tweaked that, and bbPress added the rewrite rules without issue.
@incirus – Yes, my forum is converted from phpBB as well, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. I checked a new topic, the pretty permalink worked just fine. I checked an old topic in the database, no slug. i added a slug and it worked great.
Unfortunately I have 875 topics that I would have to edit my hand… That’s too bad, one of the draws of migrating to bbPress are the useful permalinks.
Has anyone out there come up with a handy script to solve this problem? I’d imagine the code is already there, since bbPress already converts your topic title into a slug, it would just be a matter of having it process all of the old titles. But I think that’s a bit out of my league!
Hell, I’d settle for a way to use slugs from here in out, but fall back on the default permalinks if there is no slug, but I think that would be more complicated.
I dont know if it helps but I had the permalinks problem after converted from phpBB.
I solved the problem by correcting the “topic_slug” fields for each topic in topics table.
I have used PHPBB and that is a pretty robust service. But I liked having something integrated. BBPress works okay for now.
I am looking for a plugin that will allow someone to share posts on my forum via social networking sites. WordPress has tons of them. Anyone found one for BBPress yet?
Hi,
I had a long way to go, I migrated my forum from smf > phpbb3 > bbpress, and so far I’m very happy with it.
One of the problems I’m trying to solve is the avatar problem. Is there a way to manually upload my users avatar and activate it for them? (their avatar didn’t migrate, although avatar is working now, if you upload it again, but my users need to upload it again, I want to save them that trouble)
Thank you.
I’ve been using phpBB3 up until yesterday when it decided to go crazy for no reason and die. It was a good chance to change to bbPress as I had been considering it for a while. I’m loving the idea of users tagging topics but I can’t seem to find a way to edit tags like you can in WordPress’ control panel. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and people are creating tags with wrong capitalisation so any new tags that have correct capitalisation are automatically converted to the original incorrect form. Are there any plugins out for editing bbPress tags, or any way I can quickly modify them without a plugin?
here is my fix for this problem
It turned out that couple of topics in the topic tables didnt have topic start time.
It was 0000-00-00 00:00:00. It was probably from converting from phpBB.
I changed to start times and then there is no warnings anymore.
I managed to convert from phpbb3.0.5 to bbpress 1.0.1, but user’s can’t login, their password isn’t working anymore. I tried the md5 thingy, but it doesn’t seem to help.
Total newbie here, but I’m a blogger using WordPress 2.8.x who is thinking of adding a discussion forum to my site.
I am NOT a coder whatsoever, so please keep that in mind when answering, although I do have a friend who is one but I would need to be conscientous about using his time.
My question is whether bbPress 1.0 will easily integrate with WP 2.8.x as I have it currently configured. Obviously I’d want it to look similar to my site and have all the standard forum bells/whistles.
If not, does anyone have any other suggestions? I just began researching forums today. I’ve come across IPB and phpBB as other options, but again, I have no idea how easy it would be to integrate those.
Any help you can give would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks.
