[_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.

[fontadoni]

Now that I converted my board from phpbb to bbpress I need to know how to redirect the old stuff to where the new board is (so people coming from google can at least get to the new bbPress index and not just get a 401 – which is what is currently happening). I suppose I need to do this in my htaccess file. Does anyone have the code for this? Thanks.

[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.

[John James Jacoby]

Wow…

It looks darn near perfect…

If your concern is catering to screen readers, then you know that phpBB is hardly the place to start, as reading the screen outloud to yourself makes no sense at all. Imagine if you couldn’t see what you were listening to, it would be impossible. That’s why (properly coded) tables for forums make sense.

I noticed the topic view was buggered, didn’t want to load and show anything, so I assume that’s under construction… But, that’s pretty super awesome…

[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.

[John James Jacoby]

lol I gotchya…

I have been working with bbPress for 2 days now, so I can openly admit that my knowledge on the inner workings of it (and maybe its limitations) is limited to those 2 days of study.

From my experience with forum software, the category vs forum debate and struggle basically exists in a similar way, at least I know it does for phpBB. A category is just a forum without the ability to post directly to it, and I think that’s really the only way to do it without joining or adding an additional query that isn’t really necessary.

I think what it sounds like you’re asking for is something more official like what WordPress has in terms of development cycle, acknowledgment, and respect from its developers. I also think that because almost everything for bbPress is a plug-in, that the opportunity for those plug-ins not to play nice with one another is greater.

So, the dilemma is to package these as features within the forum, or allow the community to create those features when they are needed. The big guys bloat their forums with tons of stuff and allow the admin to turn them off, and bbPress does the opposite.

I’m not sure bbPress really has a development plan anymore other than tweaking and steamlining the code to work better with WordPress, and maybe eventually import/export posts from other forum software. I personally think that better user management would be nice, but that brings up how WordPress doesn’t really care about users at all. Ha!

[John James Jacoby]

You know, that WordPress is really an elaborate Forum clone, right?

Years ago, forums were threaded email responses back and forth that were documented hierarchically. Then, the idea of threads was cast away because it was thought to be too complicated to understand. Why would someone branch off to speak to a reply instead of replying to the original post/poster?

To me, it’s the nature of group discussion, and it is the difference between the intent of WordPress and bbPress, at least it was before WordPress 2.7 brought back threaded comments.

A forum is intended for multiple, typically registered commited users, and invokes group discussion that is often times allowed to skate off-topic as people reply to other people. Sometimes reply counts can escalate into the hundreds or thousands depending on the size of the forum.

A blog is intended to allow a few authors to create articles and attempts to cater to non-committed users that drop by, can leave a comment, and never look back if they don’t want to.

Since the emphasis of a blog is the initial post, comment replies typically tend to stay on topic.

Since the emphasis of a forum is to spark conversation, replies typically tend to drift off topic.

The funny thing is that both of these display methods use almost the exact same data storage and retrieval methods. Data is categorized and tagged as necessary, with a time-stamp, an excerpt, and other pertinent information.

The one major way that blogs differ from forums, is that forums restrict posts to one forum or category while blogs allow for one post to be in several. This ability inherently changes the emphasis away from categorization and towards the content of the post itself and how it relates to other possible posts.

I moved away from phpBB and towards WordPress for this specific attribute alone. Since posts can often times benefit from being in multiple categories, a blog style system makes a great deal of sense.

I think that the similarities between WordPress and bbPress exist only because they share a similar intent with data storage and categorization, and if you’ve ever read two books by the same author you’ll understand how both of them will read very similarly.

Overall I am happy that the authors of WordPress have made bbPress, as it shows a recognition of the distinct differences between the two of them.

I think as time passes, you will start to see more of how these two tools come from the same family but are different members all together. Think of them as fraternal twins.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I keep thinking back on this, and I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. I’m not speaking to the HTML/Code side of it, but the concept side. The code side, yeah, some function I would consider default is missing (Unread, maybe Allow Images)

But what’s the difference between a Forum and a Blog?

A blog is a journal. Few people make new topics, many people reply. A forum is … a forum. Many people make new topics, many people reply.

If you feel the code of a Blog is better suited to how you want to run your forum, cool. You want to use the highly structured IPB or phpBB? Have at I picked bbPress not because of the WP integration (I could care less, really) but because it gave me more options than just Category -> Forum -> Topic -> Posts, and because it’s small and lacks a lot of those fancy options.

Example? I don’t use categories at all. Don’t need ’em. I have three ‘fora’ for high level organization. I went off the same general idea I use on my Blog. Three categories, a ton of tags.

1) About the site topic (screwdriver.com is about screwdrivers, talk about them)

2) About the Website (the code behind the site, suggestions, ideas, etc)

3) Everything else (screwdrivers are nice, but I have this hammer…)

Three big, broad categories/fora whatever. The tags I sort of let explode. And even then, I’m torn between structure and free form. I want a little structure (so you don’t get tags like ‘hammer’ and ‘hammers’ which really are the same thing), but I also want freedom.

So function. If you can get all that in a blog, have at Many people do and we call ’em LiveJournal Communities

[fontadoni]

Hello there.

I recently converted my phpbb 2.x forum to bbpress. I did this successfully with the provided script by iteisa.com (phpBB2bbpress). I was lucky that I had not upgraded to phpbb 3, so I followed the instructions carefully as I read lots of people having issues with the conversion while using higher versions of phpbb. I first installed bbpress 0.7, I ran the script, and when the database conversion was done sucesfully, I upgraded to bbpress: 0.9.0.2. This was a couple of days ago and I’m very happy with the results.

Now, for my actual question. I had a pretty small board with about 100 members and as I mentioned, the conversion was pretty successful, the only weird thing I’m noticing is that ID numbers for new members are way off. Let me give you an example. One of the last members to register before the conversion has an ID number of 107 (or profile.php?id=107). New members are now getting very high ID numbers, the last member that registered has an ID number of 1000000003 (profile.php?id=1000000003).

Is this something I should worry about? Can you guys give me a few pointers on how I could change this in the database? I would like to fix it.

Sorry for the long post and I thank you in advance for your time!

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi BBpress team,

I wanted to raise a concern I’ve had for sometime, but every time I think it’s the right thing to do, there’s a new release and I thought that maybe it’d be fixed. With 1.0 in alpha stage, I figure now’s a good time.

I think we’ve got a lot of this wrong.

Not the code, not the plugins, not the community, but more the mindset behind the important features. We’ve not built forum software, we’ve built blogging software.

We make posts, and people comment on them. The focus of BBpress is on individual posts with things like tags, as opposed to the forum/section/category to which it was posted. I also appreciate the desire to streamline the code base, which is wonderful, but users and the internet-public at large expect forums to have certain features – to rely on user updated plugins for these features is not an ideal solution.

I don’t say any of this to criticise, because you folks have done amazing work given the small team and smaller community working on BBpress, and I’m massively impressed; but I think given the scale of the project you’re working on you’d want real feedback.

Let me give an example if I may, which might illustrate the issue I and other users face.

In the 1.0alpha, we finally get Categories as standard, a feature that is absolutely essential for a forum (not a blog), otherwise the ‘forums’ are just a list of wordpress categories.

The problem with Categories, is that we don’t have ‘forums’ belonging to them, instead we have ‘forums’ that are called categories. A simple 1/0 in a db. But it’s not enough. Why?

Well it means that the loop in front-page.php to iterate through forums has to check to see if it’s a category. There is no independent check for categories and forums. This of course makes no difference in the world of all forums being in a singular table (the category can just be an individual TR and we can use a PHP continue to end the loop), but as soon as we move to multiple tables (which is essential for accessibility focussed websites), or nested divs this becomes quite useless.

What we need its:

Category

Forum

Topic

Forum

Topic

Topic

Reply

Reply

Each belonging to the parent above it. But we don’t have that in BBpress for categories. It’s massively short-sighted.

Now, this may seem like a simple thing, but I raise it as more of a mindset. We’re coming across a bug/issue/problem/feature request and we’re solving that specific request rather than seeing how it fits in. Take, if I may, the brilliant UNREAD POSTS plug-in by _CK_. When it was built it added a class to the specific span of the name of the topic post in the list of topics. Upon request it then did the same to the name of the forums. At no time was the thought process – wait a minute, if I put this at the top level item of the iteration that means that all child nodes can use it. _CK_ fixed this oversight yesterday and his plugin is now brilliant and easily rivalling the methodology used in the bigger forum solutions.

But it’s the mindset behind it I think we need to change. Fixing a singular problem, or even adding a new requested feature, without planning how it will impact others or if it’s at a high enough level is starting to make BBpress look amateurish.

I’m not saying we have to emulate the big boys and their massively bloated software, but what we have to accept, as a community, is that the likes of PHPbb and IPB etc. all do certain functions as standard, and these are what our users will expect.

I can’t see a roadmap or feature list for a finished 1.0 anywhere, I can’t even see a feature list for 1.5 anywhere (and yes I’ve been to the TRAC site for both). I just get the feeling as we move towards 1.0 release, that we’re not really releasing forum software, we’re releasing blogging software:

WordPress: categories > posts > comments

BBpress: forums > topics > replies

These are effectively one and the same. I’m quiety confident that someone could write a WP theme that effectively does what BBpress does. The BBpress front page list topics then forums (with the number of topics /posts in it). A WP page could list blog Posts titles and then categories (with the number of posts / comments in it). They are, to an end user, the one and the same.

I mean, was XML-RPC absolutely essential for BBpress? It seems to me that Categories, or the Unread Posts feature would be far more essential in that other forums have them. Why haven’t we used the same folder structure as WordPress so that we can easily convince wordpress users to also use BB? Heck why isn’t even our website set out in the same way (this may bring over some WP plugin creators)?

These things are not complains, and I do not raise them to flame or criticise in anyway, I merely hope to kick start a little discussion that can see us move BBpress forward. To often in the past few months I’ve suggested BBpress to friends or fellow developers and they’ve told me that it just doesn’t meet their needs – I think that’s something we need to fix, together

Kev

[eslavin83]

can anyone help?

after the script runs, isn’t there an sql file that’s supposed to be generated from the old board & saved into a /tmp/ folder?

[eslavin83]

i’m also getting this warning message:

Warning: mysql_fetch_object(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/public_html/bbs08/phpbb2bbpress.php on line 922

[eslavin83]

can anyone answer the question regarding the “39816” error? i get up to step 8 and then that string of numbers shows up. i checked the new database and nothing has been pushed into it.

[dpi]

Hi,

I was wondering whether there’s a plug in which creates a new forum topic in bbPress and links to it everytime I post a new WordPress post?

This has three plus points:

-Forums are a more organized/structured system than a blog comments system

-In addition to being a comments system, users can also start their own threads

-Topics per post encourages users to join the forums/register at your site

Here’s an example of how it’s done (WP + PHPBB topics per post plugin)

http://www.alfredodehoces.com/wp2bb/

I hope there’s a WP + BBP version of that plugin.

[bryan868]

Just realized I can’t do it, the phpBB3 -> phpBB2 converter doesn’t bring over the users. And I don’t want to lose my userbase.

So it looks like I’ll just be waiting until a phpBB3 -> bbPress converter is finished! Whenever that’ll be!

[quidoloremipsum]

i wonder if there’s bbpress plugin that can display graphical ranks (something like phpbb’s default stars under user’s nickname…)? if no – did anyone though about writing such plugin?

[yazerty]

It seems not to work for my phpbb3 board . Perhaps the 13000 messages are for something in this… ?

If you succed, tell us bryan868 !

And will passwords be “ok” ?

[allinjac]

Did you ever make this public or avaiable for purchase or anything, lol.

Thanks,

[chrishajer]

I don’t know of a better way right now.

[bryan868]

I guess I’ll try the phpBB3 -> phpBB2 -> bbPress method. Yikes!

[WebDev WaxLotus LLC]

Caught wearing my underwear on the outside. It doesn’t make me immune to cosmic cookie rays?

This was a cherry install so I didn’t have any experience with bbPress and its issues etc. The ‘add forum’ button issue existed before I added the quick fix…I found it on my first pass through the support forums trying to see how other WP2.6 success stories started out…

Did I mention that I have the bbPress files located in a subdomain called ‘forum’ i.e. mydomain.org/forum/ ?

I’ve just gone through the phpbbb vs SMF review again, just so I can get something going while these small things get cooked off, but I think I’ll stry bbPress as a stand-alone in its own db and integrate later…Do you see any drama with that path?

I just noticed that I didn’t add the SECRET_KEY value from wp-config.php (sic) to wp-settings.php as per a comment in that file…but it turns out that’s an artifact. Strike that.

These are some of the cookies that FireBug reports:

wordpress_logged_in_f004625b18565e7c579076261d01b3a5

myDomain.org 105 B /forum/ Session



wordpress_f004625b18565e7c579076261d01b3a5

myDomain.org  95 B /wp-content/plugins Session



wordpress_f004625b18565e7c579076261d01b3a5

myDomain.org  95 B /wp-admin Session



wordpress_f004625b18565e7c579076261d01b3a5

myDomain.org  95 B /forum/my-plugins Session



wordpress_f004625b18565e7c579076261d01b3a5

myDomain.org  95 B /forum/bb-plugins Session



wordpress_f004625b18565e7c579076261d01b3a5

myDomain.org  95 B /forum/bb-admin Session



wordpress_test_cookie

myDomain.org 36 B / Session

I’m checking…

[chrishajer]

phpBB3 > phpBB2

http://www.arvystate.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.30

phpBB2 > bbPress

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/a-phpbb-to-bbpress-database-converter

I don’t think there’s any how to written for the complete process. You could be the first.

[yazerty]

Oh, it seems this will take a very long time to have a convertor for phpbb 3 :'(.

Is there another way to convert a phpbb 3 to bbpress (tutorial ?) ?