[redhousepainter]

Okay, I have to get this out of my system. But first…

I have three websites with WP. I love it. I love you all. I’m not throwing a tantrum or threatening to run off and elope with Movable Type or Joomla!.

But, here is my issue…

I want to add bbPress to one of my sites and quite possibly another that I just started.

I know there are other forum software out there but really want this to stay in the family.

My problem is that fresh out of the box bbPress looks like a manual for a cold war Soviet submarine.

Getting past that I tried to integrate my WP header into my bbPress installation but the info available on integration is either outdated or above my ability. I integrated the WP header into my gallery software (Zenphoto) with no problem at all, so it doesn’t make sense to me that integration bbPress should be harder.

Also, the forum on WordPress.org looks so good that using it is just rubbing salt in my wounds. It is as though WP is saying ‘here is what you could do with bbPress if you had a team of developers and an unlimited budget, but since you are poor and working alone… you’re out of luck!’.

Okay, I’m done ranting.

Does anyone have experience adding their WP header and footer into bbPress? I would prefer to not integrate the databases. All I really want is for the header and footer to be consistent throughout the site. I can handle the CSS part of it.

Thanks!!!

[chrishajer]

To be able to call your WordPress header and footer, you will need access to the WordPress functions get_header() and get_footer(). To have access to WordPress functions, you need to include WordPress:

https://bbpress.org/documentation/integration-with-wordpress/#func

You can skip the stuff about user integration and cookies if all you want to do it include your WordPress header and footer.

[Sam Bauers]

Keep in mind though that including WordPress inside bbPress is an incredible overhead for what is just a modification to the presentation layer.

The most lightweight solution is to create your own theme in my-templates which extends the default theme. Any file that is not found in your own theme simply falls back to using the default, so your theme could consist of as little as a style.css file (which could itself simply import the default themes style.css – see kakumei-blue theme for an example of how to do that), a header file and a footer file.

[chrishajer]

Sam, that’s a good point. Thanks.

I would say that the number one request is for people to make their bbPress look like their WordPress. Lots of people are just using a WordPress template they found, so they’re not really up for customizing bbPress, since they really didn’t customize WordPress in the first place.

If there were an easy way to make their bbPress look like their WordPress it would answer a lot of requests. I think that’s why people are sometimes drawn to a WordPress forum plugin, since then it’s just a WordPress page and it looks like the rest of their site.

1. Make bbPress look just like the WordPress it’s integrated with.

2. Make the logins work in both places (with proper roles and capabilities.)

3. .htaccess with mod_rewrite rules, out of the box, for permalink support.

With those three things, the number of support requests per day here would go down dramatically.

[Sam Bauers]

1. I have a project on the backburner which deals with this.
2. This is a lot harder, but the user role map goes a long way to adressing this.
3. It’s in the works for 1.0

[chrishajer]

1. Cool (thank you), 2. Good, 3. Awesome.

I forgot two other things which may or may not apply with current versions of bbPress. Include the my-plugins and my-templates folders, empty if necessary. Then it sort of makes sense when people are looking and thinking “where do I put this plugin?”

Not sure if the my-* folders are still necessary or if everything goes into bb-* folders now.

There was one more item, but I have lost the thought. Maybe it will come back to me later.

EDIT: oh yeah. Why not include the code for search in the template, just commented out? I know there is one camp for tags and one for search, but people asking how to add search is a fairly common thing too. It’s built in, so why not just put it in the template, and comment it out if you don’t want to default to having it turned on?

Why not something like:

<?php

/* uncomment this to show the search box

search_form( $q );

*/ ?>

[redhousepainter]

Thanks everyone for the discussion and tips – this is my first time using the bbPress forum and I have a good feeling about it!

I’ve been playing around with various suggested techniques to achieve what I want. It seems as though there are quite a few methods bouncing around the forums – unfortunately none have worked for me. Interestingly enough, none of them mention the ‘my-templates’ rule.

I’ve decided to make my life simpler and just hound you guys until I get it done as you seem to know what your doing! So, going with Sam’s suggestion to create my own them I have…

Set-up locally (in a folder called ‘my-templates’ a bare bones theme – consisting of a css file, a header file and a footer file. My only goal is for my WP header and footer to sandwich the forum.

Where do I go from here?

[redhousepainter]

Okay, the footer was no problem as mine is just some simple links. I’m having difficulty with the nav bar. In my WP theme (Mimbo) I found this code which I think corresponds to the nav bar…

<ul id=”nav” class=”clearfloat”>

[redhousepainter]

Sorry, here’s a link to my live site if it helps…

http://phauxshow.com/

[Göran]

I am very interested in the same question. I also use Mimbo (your implementation is very nice!) and I have just changed the footer wchih was easy. But adding the navigation bar at the top I do not know how to do. In by header.php in Mimbo I have the corresponding lines

<ul id=”nav” class=”clearfloat”>

/” class=”on”>Start

<?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=’); ?>

Diskussionsforum

I have changed Home to Start and added a link to my Forum. If I dont try to list pages with wp_list_pages I could perhaps write a link as I did to my Forum. Would that work?

But the formatting might disappear?

My site is http://www.goranlindgren.se

I am grateful for all suggestions!

I post this to the Mimbo Forum as well.

[Göran]

I have just started a new forum at http://www.goranlindgren.se/diskussion/

I got a letter with the password with my name Göran but could not log in with, only after giving Gran as my name.

You can log in to the key master account with the following information:

Username: Göran

Password: xxxxxxxxxxxx

This is even worse than before as I think it means that if people with common swedish names register they will get log in information that not work.

Help!!!

[redhousepainter]

Hey All,

Well, after a day playing around with creating my own template I’ve decided to go with an include. Any tips on including a WP header in a bbPress installation?

[Göran]

I have made some progress. I took the head from WordPress and managed to get a separate head by copying to Dreamweaver and keeping only the head as can be seen on http://www.enkelwebbplats.se/dig9.html Then I took this head and pasted it into header.php in bbPress. It was partly successful as I got a forum with the content I wanted but the formating is not as I want. I had earlier a Kakumei format with only changed colors (form as in another forum I run http://www.32astolf.se/forum/).

I guess I need to change which style sheets that are used but I do not understand how to get the styles I want for the discussion in my forum from bbPress header.php.

Any help would be most welcome!