[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

If phpBB isn’t good, you may have to end up with a paid system. You can try SMF (free) and it may meet your needs, but past that I dunno.

[vadi]

I don’t need any integration, and phpbb doesn’t cut it unfortunately.

[ganzua]

If you want to integrate the forum with wordpress latest version, you have two options; bbpress and simple-forum plugin.

If you need a stand-alone forum I’d go for phpbb3. It has everything that a forum should have.

[rootf]

Hi.

I want to create a forum on my WordPress 2.7 website and I decide to try bbPress, but I don’t know what integration method will be the best and I wonder wheter it is possible at all. I want fully integrated bbPress and WordPress (common header, footer, user database, etc., saying simply bbPress included in a WordPress page). Could you help me? Or maybe should I use an other script like Simple:Press Forum, punBB or phpBB? Thanks in advance.

Regards,

rootf.

[lyrics]

Its great idea to have sub forums. I agree that bbpress does not have an option for hidden forums, but the discussions can be locked and pinned up for limited conversations.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Ipstenu,

I’m going to disagree with you a little mate, and try not to take it off topic too much.

Yes, each adjective is subjective to ones perspective. “easy” and “alot” etc. can mean different things to different people. That said, lets look at them a sec.

“extensive plugins?”

There are just under 120 plugins for BBPress.

Over 1/3rd haven’t been updated in a year. I’d wager a good few of them don’t work anymore.

And the ones with latest comments 6-12 months ago, usually don’t work either.

Also from what i’ve seen about 1/4 of them are redundant or useless in 0.9 / 1.0alpha.

So we’re looking at maybe 40-50 plugins.

Does anyone think that’s “extensive”?

I know it’s subjective, but, um, well you can make up your own mind.

“You CAN redesign the hell out of a bbPress site”

To a certain extent i’ll agree and disagree with it. To redesign a bbpress forum so that it doesn’t look like this theme actually takes a bucket load of work. I’ve done it for 3 websites, and every time it’s involved me writing full on plugins just to output the right code, or W3C acceptable code, or overwrite the damned code thats stored outwith the templates (why is that btw?).

Can i stop and ask that? WHY does a theme designer NEED to write alot of non basic php code as a separate to their theme plugin, just to over write HARDCODED design output? Since when was hardcoding design output into the core of a theme-able piece of software a good idea?

What you can’t do with bbpress, is hand a Designer/ HTML coder your template files and expect to get anything back that’s not a flat output of a table. It’s a point I raised a while ago (and i’ll not bang on about it) but BBpress works at doing one thing. Outputting a flat list from a database.

In terms of your all forums kinda look the same , i have to agree in this instance. Most forums, ipb/vBulletin/phpBB etc do all look the same. but guess what. bbpress doesn’t look much like them. I’ve stated before BBpress’s horrific handling of parent/children with categories etc. is bloody woeful; but if you’re talking about usability, then bbpress starts to fall down a little.

What it outputs is simple, yes, to the user, but it’s not very perceptive. Finding a specific post or vital information (say that 0.9 = WP2.5 – you know , something you’d expect to be on the documentation or download page but is actually on page 3 of a topic started 1 year ago) , is a disaster. It’s reliant on the user

who posted the content using TAGS appropriotely and ofc it requires a better search function.

Lets not forget that ‘tags’ are fairly new, and really only web savvy people use/know about them. A huge chunk of this software’s cross-pollination and iteration is taken out of the developers hands and placed smack bang in teh hand of the end user (whom we know nothing about nor can reply on).

Just because something is simple/plain, does not make it inherently usable.

Think Boo.com.

================================================

Anyway, there are a number of things we’d all like to see fixed in bbpress. Some more vital than others. we’ll all agree and disagree on many, but my over riding feeling is this:

Our Clients, customers, friends, colleagues, schools, own sites, will at some stage like to, nah need to, be updated to the latest version of WordPress. it will vary from person to person, but at some stage you know that a wordpress upgrade is probably in the pipes.

But if you’re using BBpress, then you’ve been forced to hold off upgrading for over half a year. We will be/are a whole version behind, and surely someone can see that it’s got to be an issue.

I suppose what i dont understand is, and maybe i’m the only one, so please 100% feel free to explain it to me like an idiot.

if The most requested topic on this website is “wordpress integration”, and the singular fail point of the software is “wordpress integration”, and teh company that owns this software also own wordpress, and it happens to be your singular initial selling point of the software, um, well, WHY THE HELL HAS IT NOT BEEN THE ONLY PRIORITY AND FIXED IN THE 3 MONTHS SINCE 1.0ALPHA CAME OUT?

We’ve had other fixes, new code, new features, a facebook page (see i hadn’t forgotten), but yet without even a hint of when this base level feature might appear, we’re told it’s a moving target.

Please, explain it to me like a 5 year old, that hasn’t read the blog posts linking to the $29 million dollars investment, that also lead to Sam being taken on as a full time developer on bbpress (i.e. dont say no time/resources).

[wmnasef]

no worries about subforums, they will appear as with phpbb3, but bbpress doesn’t have the hidden forum option so they will be viewable to everyone after conversion.

maybe you can use that plugin to hide them again after conversion.

[hhberthelsen]

Sounds awesome, will test it one of the next days. We have nearly 200.000 posts – will be interesting to test, and surely on my own dedicated server 😮

Any concerns regarding subforums or “hidden” forums, that i should be warned about?

[John James Jacoby]

I think you summed it up awesomely. I know that I’ve only recently discovered bbPress, and that right now my contributions are minimal and certainly don’t justify the attitude that came out of my fingers. I do sincerely apologize for venting my frustrations, but Chris is totally right as far as login and theme integration go.

I graduated to WordPress from phpBB and the CHBB categories hierarchy spin-off of phpBB2.x. What I love about WP, I hate about phpBB, and what I love about phpBB, I hate about WordPress. What the phpBB team always did well, was catalog and document their code and coding guidelines, almost always and from the start. Even though different authors wrote different pages, the code always looked the same and worked the same, but WP and BBP aren’t like that. Finding and repairing WP/BBP issues is becoming increasingly difficult as there are functions hidden within functions that add one extra capability just to echo other functions.

If I could have a dream job right now, it would be to get paid to be the code janitor to the automatic teams code for the wp3.0 and bbpress 2.0 milestones. To refresh the codebase for the major revisions. Also coming from phpBB, I’m surprised to see WP uses so many echo statements all over the place. I feel the template engine that the phpBB Categories Hierarchy uses was just so amazing and worked so well that moving to WordPress felt like a step sidways.

Anyhow, I’ve taken this topic way off topic, and I don’t mean to vent my ill feelings in what should be a celebration topic. If you mods want to clean this up or split this apart I would totally understand.

Cheers!

[_ck_]

I just disagree with promoting a product before it’s even usable.

bbPress is very usable, just not finished. But it’s certainly *not* being promoted. All we have is this support forum. If it was being promoted, it would be listed on WordPress.org/WordPress.com and there would be hundreds of thousands of users. bbPress currently has less than 10,000 active installs. That should change by this time next year.

bbPress was originally written by Matt to simply give a support forum for WordPress (WordPress.org). Everything from there was just Matt releasing the source. There never was a general plan after that until Matt started talking about TalkPress which is still very far away by my best guess.

bbPress’s greatest strength is it can be integrated in many websites easily and made to look like them easily. But it’s still a growing child and very young. If you are looking for a polished product, you need something with over half a decade of development like phpBB, vBulletin or SMF. The downside to them is they are very rigid and hard to develop for. bbPress is incredibly easy to develop for, I only learned PHP a few years ago and look what I’ve managed to do. Just imagine what a person who knew what they were doing could do

[the_Wish]

I was looking into this the other day since I know that phpBB has a plugin to do just that, show a downsized clickable Image to prevent users from messing with the layout.

Here’s the Demo: http://phpbbegypt.com/PHPBB/viewtopic.php?t=70

My users are annoying in that aspect. : /

Wonder if this could be translated into bbPress.

[wmnasef]

i used phpbb for like 5 years now, it’s a great forum software, but i have to say that i admire the simple/plain approach of bbpress.

so, am working on a phpbb3 -> bbpress converter. so far i figured all i need to convert forums, topics, posts, user info. i only have a problem moving user passwords, so does anybody know of a way of importing user passwords from phpbb3 to bbpress ? the problem is that phpbb3 doesn’t use plain md5 anymore, and i don’t know exact details about the new hashing method.

am thinking about importing all users without passwords- or even with unified password, then generate new passwords for them all through bbpress admin panel and send it to their emails, but if i can import passwords it would be far better.

anybody interested in helping me ?

[John James Jacoby]

@elwagar: Conversely, once they are registered you can assign them a role by going to the bbPress admin, WordPress Integration, and remapping. I feel like a plug-in could help this registration laziness along, but I also think this should just work correctly right away.

I actually had a similar issue years ago integrating phpBB 2.x and osCommerce together, trying to get one to work inside the other with cookies and what-not was a really big problem, one that I never really did get working 100% correctly.

I have no experience with bbPress Live, but it might be worth looking into. CK posted a really nice SQL example on how to grab information without a plug-in, so if you can’t get that to work, you could always put in a little manual labor.

[nicknichols]

Greetings…after becoming disenchanted with phpBB our science forum is looking for a new home. But we need to be able to upload large documents, spreadsheets, PPTs, etc. for each other to view. If we can do the uploads/downloads of data….bbPress would be GREAT! But from what I can see one can only attach 100K docs. Is there a plugin for larger uploads? Server space is no problem for us.

Thanks! –Nick

[sidisok]

I am also curious as to when a converter would be available. The only thing holding me back from switching to bbPress is the lack of an easy way to import a phpBB3 database into a bbPress installation.

[bryan868]

Is there an ETA on the converter?

[Paulo Espíndola]

great post problem solved

[Paulo Espíndola]

I’m using a translator, I would like to import my phpbb 3 for wordpress the easy way and practice …

[techypenguin]

Thanks but the quiries doesnt work. might be because of my theme. anyway, most of the paid server out there are much faster than the virtualhost. all other cms template like phpbb3 and mambo i’ve tried are slower than the previous version of them. i already max out my cache on the server but it’s still slow . sometime it’s crash after a week or so. dont have budget for the bladeserver though.haha

[mxadness]

A simple phpBB3 to bbPress converter would be great. I really hope this gets done soon — bbPress + WordPress absolutely rocks.

[chrishajer]

You would need to map all the old phpBB URLs to new bbPress URLs, one to one, since it doesn’t look like there’s an easy way to create a rewrite rule. Once you have all the URLs before and after, you can create 301 redirect rules in your .htaccess file.

[stevedrum]

as someone who has used phpbb 2, phpbb3, invision and many other smaller packages i was probably a little bit biased towards forums. but then i started blogging with wordpress, and hence to bbpress.

let me say first of all that i like bbpress. after using those other bloated packages for years, it’s refreshing to get back to what it’s all about: a lightweight forum that’s just for… talking.

but i agree with the guy who wrote the original post. there are some things that a forum package needs. using bbpress straight out of the box is like stepping back in time.

here are my personal bugbears…

1) guests need the ability to post. you can’t build up a forum from scratch without that — it’s near impossible. because no one bothers to sign-up until the forum is relatively busy.

2) you need some kind of permission system. otherwise how can you talk to the other moderators? there is no PM system (which is fine) — but the only way you can do it out of the box is by email. you need to be able to create a forum that only the moderators can see, and other stuff like that.

i haven’t looked at the new version you’re working on, so maybe they are included in the new one. but leaving stuff like that up to the plug-in makers is crazy. Not that the plugins wouldn’t work fine, because no doubt they would — but nobody could be certain that a plugin will still work when a new version comes out. it could potentially wreck the usability of your board.

i think when you leave simple stuff like that out all it does is put off the people who might otherwise be prepared to switch over from packages like phpbb.

i do like bbpress though, and i am still going to carry on using it. …so i say these criticisms with love!

[_ck_]

Heh, Kevin you made what I had been working on at random times. A phpbb template for bbPress. Except my project was to use real phpbb templates and translate them into bbPress templates from the raw files. Kinda gave up on that one after the first week so I’m glad you made it happen (at least the default template).

To the best of my knowledge, no one has made a theme with non-table front-page/forum-page. But hey I have 5000 bbPress sites sitting in my db so I can do a scan for you later and let you know if any of them managed to pull it off.

This is a list of all the existing, public/free bbPress themes to date:

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/available-themes

Oh and yes, there is no documentation. This has always been a complaint, but no-one has risen to the task. The problem is bbPress has been constantly changing – there isn’t even an official/final 1.0 release yet, which is probably why no-one has pinned it down. The database from 0.9 to 1.0 changed somewhat radically too. Now that 1.0 beta is in sight, someone should probably start working on some notes for plugin and theme developers.

What would probably help is an official codex for bbPress. There’s an unofficial wiki but it’s barely used. If it was a tab here, that would be entirely different.

ps. I completely disagree with the idea of trying to uses lists where tables currently are. 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 am not at all discouraging you from trying it as it would be interesting to see. But lists for the sake of simply not using tables is wrong IMHO.

[fontadoni]

Hello Ipstenu, thanks for your response. Sorry, I should have mentioned that the new bbpress board is actually on the same folder as the previous phpbb one (/forum), however, I get people coming from google trying to find phpbb pages like:

/forum/viewtopic.php?p=66sid=c72c343df3c37339b4d5094a1296566d

,but the new pages now look more like: forum/topic.php?id=38 on bbpress.

I was wondering if there’s a code I can add so people coming from google at least can be redirected to the forum’s index, right now they’re getting a 404 (sorry, I said 401 previously) because the old page can’t be found.

At least until google indexes everything again.

Thanks.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

You mean to just redirect one folder to another?

Pretend your old forum was at http://www.domain.com/phpbb2 and the new one is at http://www.domain.com/bbpress

Delete the phpbb2 folder and in your .htaccess add this:

RewriteRule ^phpbb2(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/bbpress/ [L,R=301]

That will make what’s called a Permanent redirect, and in theory teach site crawlers what’s up. Mind, a 401 is for unauthorized access, which is an odd error to get.