[RB2108]

Hi .. As a volunteer, I’ve created and run a website for a local dental charity http://www.dentaid.org which uses WordPress and a custom theme. The charity have asked me whether its possible to add a forum within the existing site to allow the dental volunteers who go on organized trips to developing countries to get together before the expeditions and discuss topics, ask questions of the organizer etc. Clearly bbPress is a natural candidate for this but having spent a few hours searching the web, I’m not 100% sure of the right way to proceed (and of what I’ve read, there seems to be several different ways to implement bbPress .. maybe depending upon the level). I would like the forum to work as a self-contained subsystem within the existing web site with one entry URL (www.dentaid.org/forums) which can be added to the nav bar and maintaining the existing header/nav bar and footer, so using the one column full screen width content for bbPress. I think that bbPress will need it’s own styling as I’m sure that the existing style.css won’t be optimal for forums.

I’ve tried putting bbpress shortcodes into new pages as recommended in some of the web articles but although it appears to work, the styling is not ideal and functionally it seems very basic. What I’m aiming for is to put something like the bbPress forum page that I’m using right now into the content of a page on our website while keeping the rest of the website exactly asis. (I would also like to allow new folks to register and/or existing users retrieve their lost passwords from within the bbPress ‘subsystem’ i.e. provide complete forum functionality from within the bbp system.

Any help as to how I go about this would be much appreciated as the charity have decided that this is an urgent requirement for a trip to Uganda coming up soon and I don’t want to go off at a tangent and waste a whole load of time climbing the learning curve. At the moment, I’m confused as to whether I should be using widgets, creating child themes, using shortcodes with my own pages or anything else.

Pointers to web pages, documents, videos or just some good old-fashioned advice will be very welcome.

Thanks in anticipation.
Ron