[johnhiler]

Post a link to your site? I’d like to run some quick tests…

[Scott Kingsley Clark]

I wanted to let everyone know that I’ve been working on a clone of bbPress which is built entirely in Pods. I’m not intending it to replace bbPress, but I am intending to continue development of the functionality to bring it to more of a vBulletin level. That’s the big picture anyway, I’m nearly done with getting bbPress functionality done itself.

You can see my progress here:

http://www.scottkclark.com/forums/beta-testers-unite/current-status-of-the-forums-package/

Once I’ve completed it, I will post the package on the Pods site so you can just import the package into your own site.

For info about Pods, go to http://pods.uproot.us/

[David-]

I achieved this within 30mins or less. Here’s how to go about it:

The first thing you need to do is download the latest phpbb, and install on a subdomain (I name mine phpbb, like this: http://www.mysite.com/phpbb).

Then download the Smf 2.0 to Phpbb converter here: http://dicky.askmaggymae.com/files/SMF_20B3_to_phpBB3.zip

Now upload the zip file to the root directory where you installed phpbb (in my case: http://www.mysite.com/phpbb)

I suggest you upload the zip file directly, then extract from your cpanel file manager in order not to mess up with the folder structure.

Now point your browser to where you installed phpbb, in my case: http://www.yoursite.com/phpbb/install/index.php and then click on the convert tab, and a list of converters will come up, you’ll see smf 2.o listed there. Just continue from there following the instructions listed.

During the convert there’s a stage where phpbb would be asking for the path to your smf 2.0 board, simply enter it. In my case smf was on: http://www.mysite.com/forums, so I entered: ../forums. Initially my smf was installed at: http://forums.mysite.com, I kept getting errors, so I just moved it with my cpanel file manager to: http://www.mysite.com/forums. And the whole process went smoothly.

But if your smf is on the root, just enter this value there: ../

If you follow the above instructions, you should get your smf converted to phpbb without a glitch.

Now it’s time to convert to BBpress (the mighty bbpress).

Download the latest version, and install exactly where you want it to be, in my case I installed it on the root which is http://www.mysite.com. You must install bbpress using the same database with the phpbb you just converted.

Now download the phpbb to bbpress converter here: http://members.lycos.co.uk/wmnkhayal/files/phpbb3tobbpress%20converter.tar.gz

Extract the zip on your desktop, and you’ll end up with two files.

Upload the phpbb3tobbpress.php file to the root directory of your phpbb (in my case: http://www.mysite.com/phpbb)

copy the other file which is: _phpbb3_pass.php to your newly installed bbpress plugins directory. Copy this to bb-plugins folder and not to my plugins.

Now point your browser to where you installed phpbb, and add the link of the converter at the end, in my case this was: http://www.mysite.com/phpbb/phpbb3tobbpress.php and follow the instructions to convert your phpbb board to bbpress.

As simple as that. I’m no expert, so anybody should be able to do this. Anyways I’m available to questions.

Welcome to bbpress!

[jasbg]

Thanks a lot ashfame !

As you observed I managed to get rather confused about the connections between the different systems here.

I will follow your advice and test the combination you mention here !

Jens

[jasbg]

Hi

Been trying to install Buddypress onto a clean BBPress instalation – but it keeps giving me an error:

---

Warning: require_once(WP_PLUGIN_DIR/buddypress/bp-core.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in C:wampwwwbbpressmy-pluginsbuddypressbp-loader.php on line 19

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘WP_PLUGIN_DIR/buddypress/bp-core.php’ (include_path=’.;C:php5pear’) in C:wampwwwbbpressmy-pluginsbuddypressbp-loader.php on line 19

---

Does anyone know if this installation is at all possible (clean BBPress + BuddyPress forum) ?

I would like to avoid using WordPress Mu – to keep things as lean (simple) as possible !

Thanks in advance for any advice on the subject !

Jens

btw. – I have for a couple of weeks been doing research on how to run the best and most sufficient frontend bases open posting site (or almost open) – and has ended with bbPress (has 12 different test systems running on wamp and easyphp – among them Word MU – Drupal version 6 and 7 and others. It’s close to chaos for sure)

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

Trunk is the bleeding edge version which is under development. Like a newer version under development. Trunk means the latest code in development stage. I am running a little busy right now. If left with some time tonight, I might try to catch it on trunk

[johnhiler]

Hmm, I heard that email notification was now in the core of the latest (trunk) release.

Brandon – what version of bbPress were you using before you upgraded?

[chrishajer]

Very strange. Can’t see the permissions there, but if I am understanding that listing, you are in the correct location.

So, why can’t you load that file in a browser? Can’t load this one either, which you should be able to: http://www.leaf-age.com/forum/my-plugins/tinymce/tiny_mce/license.txt

I also noticed a redirection from non-www to www, when it goes to the 404. Not sure that’s related, since the other forum pages seem to work without www. Anything interesting going on in your .htaccess with rewrite rules? I’m not sure when the redirection is happening, before or after the 404. I doubt it’s related but it’s something.

Can you put a file one level up, in the tiny_mce folder, call it test.txt or something, then see if you can load it in a browser by URL. If not, go up one more directory, to tinymce, and try accessing the file there (put the file there first) and if that does not work, copy it to my-plugins, and then try to load it at that URL.

[Alex Luft]

Yeapp, the file is there, but I can’t open it for some reason. I even double, triple, and quadruple-checked it, but it takes me back to the WP blog when I try to navigate it.

It is properly called in the header as well.

My testbed install, at techsnack.tv/forum/ displays it perfectly here

http://techsnack.tv/forum/my-plugins/tinymce/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js

The only difference b/w the two installs is that WP is installed in root at leaf-age while WP for techsnack is installed in /site/

Does that make a difference?

[Steven Hodson]

@Gautam .. I did manage to find one of the things that was causing a problem. It has to do as I suspected with the PHP $_SERVER[“DOCUMENT_ROOT”] variable. It doesn’t exist in an PHP install on IIS.

Now I have found a work-around that <gasp> works and when tested returns the proper path (eg: C:/Domains/winextra.com/bb-attachments/ – which from what I can tell in the “instructions” is exactly how it is suppose to be)

But when I try to upload a file (text/image) I get the following two errors and I was hoping that maybe you could help figure out what might be causing them

---

Warning: filesize() [function.filesize]: stat failed for 83def462ed888db6e1ad898505ea40b6 in C:Domainswinextra.comwwwrootforumsmy-pluginsbb-attachmentsbb-attachments.php on line 342

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at C:Domainswinextra.comwwwrootforumsmy-pluginsbb-attachmentsbb-attachments.php:342) in C:Domainswinextra.comwwwrootforumsbb-includesfunctions.bb-pluggable.php on line 228

---

any help (from anyone ) would be greatly appreciated as this is the last real big complaint my members have.

EDIT: The files are getting uploaded but to the root folder and they are not being entered into the bb-attachments table – http://screencast.com/t/Y2UyZGQ4

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi flowiesowieso,

Deprecated errors:

This is a common error with WAMP runing PHP 5.3.

You should go to the WAMP homepage > addons > PHP > 5.2.x (latest one)

Download, Install and then next time you start WAMP, you can click the menu-bar option (bottom right of the screen) and change the PHP version it’s running.

This issue has been fixed for the next release of bbPress, so it’s only a small issue.

Cannot determine:

This is an upgrade issue.

The easiest way is to head into phpmyadmin and look through your meta table and see if you see anything weird or blank. I know that’s kind of vague (sorry), but there’s a good chance you’ll see your URL slightly wrong in one of the fields (no http, or no localhost or something).

let us know what you find.

[johnhiler]

Do you have any programming resources or budget available? It’d be a pretty straightforward effort to upgrade the plugins to work with the latest bbPress version…

[johnhiler]

I’m pretty sure you can lower the number of queries involved to pull the latest poster properly… my board also has several hundred forums, and we found a way around it. I’ll look into how we did that…

That said, please don’t (even jokingly) refer to anyone as an idiot! I’m sure you’re not being serious, but words like that have a tendency to get people to focus on the personalities and not the content discussed.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Kind of mate

In fact, I’m sure that a lot if not everything bbPress related could be done with plugins, but it comes to a point in time where a certain number of plugins are needed as standard for the forum to function properly.

I mean, “forum_is_category” and “topic_voices” are in the core now, but rather than being in the core tables, are still added and fiddled around with as meta data, so there’s always an INNER JOIN needed or additional SQL calls.

Call up a topic, in SQL, simple. How many Posts? there’s the data. How many tags? there’s the data. Heck, last poster’s name? sure! How many voices? oh hell no! I don’t keep that data here. It’s a secret!! Even though it’s a one to one relationship and it’s in the core, we keep that somewhere totally different, and you need to come up with a totally different method of getting that info. Ha, i mean, just cos it’s in the core, doesn’t mean it’s laid out prof… well we don’t use it on the WP support forums.

I’m not suggesting anything overtly Machiavellian at all, please don’t assume that and if I’ve given that impression I’m sorry (sometimes i jokes dont translate well), but if you give the data-structure to a DBA or heck, a basic developer they’ll scratch their heads. There is no really good reason for something like “forum_is_category” or “topic_views” to be held in a separate table as a data row, other than the one major forum where it’s not used. And that’s ok, he who pays the piper calls the tune, but that’s a core issue.

Realistically, thats not a coding issue, it’s a perspective issue. In order to get at the data, we need to call additional database information that we don’t need. Why do we need that overhead, even if it’s small.

Deep down, I can’t believe I need a plugin for my forum to be able to say it has posts underneath it though. That isn’t a bug and it isn’t intended, it just wasn’t thought of.

Same with Mass deleting of users / topics / posts. Or the ability to be able to add any form of ordering or filtering to any of them. Just wasn’t thought of.

I can understand a plugin with a specific purpose in this field (I’ve written one that marks any “.ru” and “.cn” user as bozo automatically), that’s cool. But I still think it’s daft that I have to manually search the user list every day for members with certain words in it – that stuff became bog standard on the internet a long time ago.

You know, once i search for (and find) a user, it then takes me 7 clicks and 4 different pages to delete the user. And there is no en-mass option. 7 clicks and 4 pages!!!! That’s not a ‘plugin or not plugin’ issue, that’s no PM/BA/IA/common-sense issue. I mean, really, having to leave the admin area to interact with a user? They got rid of that idea in wordpress almost 3 years ago.

I don’t want to flog a dead horse, but now that WordPress isn’t being ported to backPress (at least in the next version minimum), can you imagine the difference that rolling in a moderation suite or really any of _ck_’s non-fluff (smilies, bbcode) plugins into the core would have made in the 14 months between 0.9 and 1.0 being released? Hey has anyone used XML_RPC to post to their forums yet? it’s awesome…

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

Is the concern that since the data design isn’t optimized for inherited forums, the query count will go up?

Yeah, kind of. It’s more that it’s already gone up, and as themes become more complex, it’ll go up again.

Let me give an example, and it’s a walkthrough – there could be code optimization.

To load the last forum poster/post (and btw this is for the singualar, not the child, which would multiply this by each child forum), you effectively are looking up the topic with the last date that’s attatched to that forum, and then look up the last post that’s attatched to that topic. Ok, so that’s 2 additional SQL calls for every forum thats displayed in the forum list.

(EDIT: actually, I’m confident it’s just 1 INNER JOIN SQL call now, but it’s still not needed really).

Now on a forum like this, or on WP support forums, thats only 6 forums. ok, so 6 additional calls total. Meh, not fussed.

But do you see how this doesn’t scale? On one of my forums, a football one, we’ve a “forum” for every football team in the UK. There’s no “latest” list, as we want people to talk in their own club’s section. Thing is that’s:

England

– Prem

– – 22 teams

– (Another 4 divisions of 24 teams)

Scotland

– SPL

– – 12 teams

– (Another 2 divisions of 16 teams)

It was facing meltdown every now and then, and I realised why, I’m placing an additional 150 SQL calls every time I want to display the list of forums, simply to find out the last post in a forum (and that’s NOT including the code needed if I was to respect genealogy).

Here’s the thing though, the TOPIC table has a column called: topic_last_post_id. Do you know why? Because it allows an inner join rather than an additional SQL call. Very sensible. Of course, it just wasn’t transposed to the bit that a certain support forums didn’t use.

If we applied the same logic to “forums” as to the topics, heck even put it in the meta data table, we’d add 1 SQL command in total when a new post was added, instead of 1 SQL per forum listed per pageload per user. Now, i could write a plugin to do that, but it’s not solving the issue, it’s just papering over the cracks in the datastructure.

I’m sure there will be some people reading this and they wont get that that i’m talking about data structure and optomization, and not specifically about “last forum poster”. I’m not advocaating category heavy forums or flat file forums, i’m saying that we’ve got some real data holes, and i think we should discuss them. How long until i’m told to leave bbPress because on some of my websites I use it differently to someone who has relatively few uesers and so isn’t hitting any of these issues? I bet not long.

I am not in any way having a go at any current/ Past developer/ development team/ Santa nor the Easter bunny. But the data is set up in a way in which it is ideally suited for 1 type of forum, and not for any of the others. Thats cool, but if bbPress is going to be a WPplugin, then this doesn’t matter. If there’s going to be a standalone version, then this sort of thing really needs to be looked at.

There’s countless examples of this; I’m just going with the one that people can replicate easily.

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

I’d like to stress i’m not advocating a massive change to the core, honestly I’m just up for discussion. I’m really just wanting to know people’s feelings or thoughts on this. Far too much data is not readily/intrinsically/obviously available especially when said data is on a predefined 1-to-1 relationship.

Maybe if the data structure wasn’t so wishy-washy at points, there might be more plugin developers, or themes that looked a little more like the themes available on any of the other forums.

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

John you’re also right that a “moderation suite” could be done via a plugin, my thoughts on that though would be “XML-RPC is a standard feature, but moderating my forum is a 3rd party plugin”?

I don’t think that making Forums read only on a selective basis is the work of a plugin, thats integral to how a forum works. Same with certain forums being visible to certain people.

The ability to move/sticky/resolved a topic/post from inside the admin area isn’t the job of a plugin, thats the job of the admin area. otherwise, what the point of the admin area

I’m sure there are things that I think should be standard that many other don’t; and vice versa. I don’t want bloatware, i’m not suggesting we copy phpBB or anything else, but i also think that just because we can have a plugin to do a job that we should always have a plugin to do a job. Also, just because something works with the current datastructure, doesn’t mean it’s even close to optimal.

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

Phew, longer than i wanted. Probably wrote many things which people will get annoyed at. Then again, i’m sure some idiot will be along in a minute demanding that we stop talking about this and include Facebook Connect, Polls, Smileys etc. I wonder how long that will take before my data structure conversation gets it’s first “ZOMG i cant code so ignore data structurz & make me XXX feature”.

[Gautam]

Specifically, bbPress is effectively set up to meet singular criteria, and really struggles to be adaptable. I’d go as far as to say it’s far to blog like in data structure. I’m confident that if i had a few days off work (and with no kids) that i could easily make a wordpress theme that would look and work exactly the same as bbPress. That’s fairly disappointing.

Theme porting is not that much work, I have done that 2 times till now.

bbPress makes no attempt to update parent forums. It’s a major flaw that leads to forum X having no information on forum Y at all, even though they are directly related. Instead, in order to find this out, a plugin that makes numerous SQL calls every time a forum is loaded (and for every forum listed) must be created to fake this basic functionality.

Report it in trac.

Regarding moderation, in the latest trunk you can mass-delete posts and topics, and I have also posted a working patch to delete multiple users in one go and have the patch (on my local copy) to sort users by username, email, signup date ascending/descending.

[chrishajer]

If you can log in at WordPress, navigate to the forums, still be logged in, and then log out and do the reverse, your cookie integration is fine. To test the rest (the reason you included wp-load.php) try using a WordPress function (wp_list_pages()) in a bbPress template and see if it works. Those would be good tests.

[johnhiler]

It looks like this is the latest 1.0 alpha to include the importer and exporter:

https://trac.bbpress.org/browser/tags/1.0-alpha-6/bb-plugins/bbxf/

Sam mentioned in that earlier link that he’d rather have the importer/exporter based on RSS rather than a custom XML format… I think that’s why he actually removed it.

That said, you’re welcome to try out the bbxf plugins! It’d be great if someone could test them out and report back if they work or not!

[Anonymous User]

With ‘Login-Less Posting’ and the plugin ‘Human Test’ activated the post-form shows this error:

Fatal error: Call to a member function has_cap() on a non-object in /kunden/199620_87439/webseiten/forum/my-plugins/human-test.php on line 49

Without ‘Human Test’ the post-form shows the login box …

[Anonymous User]

Hi all,

my first test shows that the trunk version of bbPress breaks ‘BB Anonymous Posting’, ‘Post Meta for bbPress’, ‘Human Test for bbPress’ and ‘bbPress-WordPress syncronization’.

And the new “Login-Less Posting” doen’t work in my installation.

So I will do more testing tomorrow …

[Anonymous User]

Hi Chris,

thanks for your answer. I’ll try testing this weekend.

But I think I must test the Login-Less Posting on my localhost before switching the function on my real forum at http://www.mysteria3000.de/forum

Markus

[devpaq]

Is there any way to set all posts to be held for moderation? I don’t want any posts to show up without being approved first (similar to the comments feature on WP).

I was using the plugin BB Moderation Hold (0.4.1) before I upgraded, but it doesn’t seem to work with the latest version of BB.

Thanks.

[Gautam]

We don’t do beta testing at BBpress.

Who said? We had alphas and betas for 1.0.

[bobtheman]

thanks for your reply kevin, the reasons of why bbpress should be a plugin was briefly discussed above in the topic, having bbpress contingent on wordpress belittles bbpress and strangles its ability to develope as an open source project.

1. As already addressed, the majority of people talking about integration, plugin, wordrpess .. if we took a long hard look arnt talking about it because they want bbpress to be a plugin, they just want some form of integration and use those terms interchangeably… very lossly might i add.

2. We are still an opensource project and the community matters. its up to the PM’s to get the community as a whole involved with submitting tickets, testing beta versions and getting interests in programing “recruiting”

3. its obvious people dont like the bbpress as a plugin idea, and when the team no matter who it is decides in disregard of the community it will show in the contributions.. case and point. The bbpress project doesn’t technically need funding from automattic “it would be nice though” .. because an opensource project like this should be able to develop a business plan and project plan and flourish as all other opensource projects do.

4. You’ve addressed why in your opinion we can change anything and our “votes” dont count. Congratulations… but you forgot to give your opinion and viewpoint on the topic at question.

oh yeah… there are programmers that can contribute to the project hiding amongst us

[johnhiler]

It’s not so hard to integrate WordPress with bbPress 0.9. Although I do think you’re right that it’s easier to integrate WordPress and bbPress if you’re using the latest versions of both.

[kevinjohngallagher]

An extremely, over exaggerated word that has been used to change the developmental focus of bbpress is Integration.

You’ve totally got this wrong bobtheman mate.

WordPress Integration is the most used phrase on this board, and the most used tag. It’s also a feature, listed in the features page. It’s also why alot of people came to this project. If it’s not something you want, cool, but it is something the majority want.

1. Single Signon

2. Single Theme

3. Admin panel they recognise

This is mostly what people want. We know this thanks to metrics, tags, being here for 2 years, and at least 50% of support requests fall into this category. At the end of the day it comes down to this:

If you don’t care about WordPress Integration use BBpress 0.9.

It’s awesome, fast, easy to theme, and miles better than the hatched testing ground for BackPress that 1.0.2 is.

If you do care about WordPress integration use BBpress 1.0.2

It’s ridiculously convoluted to set up, with more pitfalls than an Indiana Jones movie, but once working it’s ok.

If you don’t want BBpress to become a WordPress plugin, buy out Automattic. Or, and this is the biggie, give [the project owner] good objective reasons as to why it would be beneficial for them in the long run. Otherwise, you’re as well adding “Waaaaahhhhhhhhhh >.<” to the end of every sentence. Because that is what it sounds like to [the project owner].

To end this chapter of confusion and to get bbpress back on trac, on February 14 I propose a IRC meeting which will follow with a blog post of the results with a roadmap for the future

I know we’re all geeks, but cant we pretend like Feb14th might actually see us doing something else? I’m confident i’ll lose what’s left of my genitalia if I tell my partner that i’m not taking her to Paris so we can do an IRC chat.