@JJJ
Yeah the code looks much more user friendly than before. I was actually meaning to ask how this is going to work with bp as that is my ultimate goal. Hoping we don’t have to wait till 1.4 or something… I have not been paying attention to any bp/bbpress news lately, so way behind the times.
I just found bbp_custom_template so needless to say I am in heaven. So long as I have an easy way of using my own template files for each custom bbpress area, life is good.
p.s.
Are there plans on adding in post taxonomies metadata for things like turning forum posts into ‘questions, answers, suggestions, etc’ like getsatisfaction does?
(If not then I’ll do it myself, just don’t want to recreate a wheel already built)
@anointed – Most likely not in core, no; so create away. Technically ‘topics’ are questions, and ‘replies’ are answers and suggestions. Since they are all just custom post types, and everything is filtered with actions everywhere, you should be able to create custom taxonomies, adjust the custom post type properties, and all kinds of fun things.
SORRY if I’m posting in the wrong place but it seems JJJ may hold the answer to an issue i’m contending with.
Feel free to admonish me if this isn’t the appropriate venue.
I’m re-building a member site with several “levels” of member/access.
Each member level (as you would expect) has separate access to different pages/posts etc…
I’m trying to build a forum that follows the same content protection strategy. The user roles in the stock WP and BBP are inadequate for me needs, but my membership site plugin+Infusionsoft are managing the content protection VERY well…..so my bottleneck is finding a forum that will suffice.
Currently I’m trying to use 2 separate BBP (stand alone) installations, and using 2 separate pages (1 for each member level), and limiting access to those pages by member level.
Does anyone know if this BBP plug in would fit into this model well??
And if no….anyone know of any potential options??
Thanks all!
@Ryan
Turns out I was just missing a “forums” page in my WP pages. Duh!!
Thanks for the help all!
Jonathan
@anointed said “I just found bbp_custom_template so needless to say I am in heaven. So long as I have an easy way of using my own template files for each custom bbpress area, life is good.”
anointed, thanks for pointing this out. I’ve looked at that function and believe it would indeed be extremely useful in creating/integrating a custom theme! Unfortunately I’m not really clear on how to use it. Could you (or JJJ) possibly elaborate a bit on what you’re doing/planning to do with it?
Thanks!!
Jonathan
@jjj thanks for that tip on the buddypress group forum thing. Was thinking of some wild paradise thing where I turned on the plug in and it pulled everything from everywhere and all was well in forum world. (yes I know that is a fantasy but one can dream).
I just went in and created a forum. It showed up so I created a second and a third. I thought I would be smart and try using the category. That seemed to mess up the main forum page and at some point I had topics stacked on top of what should have been my top forums. I removed the categories altogether and now have a bunch of forums with some topics in it. The front page – http://crosseyedgaming.com/forum/ surely is not showing like it should be or like it did at one point.
I have to be missing something as although it wasn’t super pretty there was a nicer looking main page then what I have now. Just don’t know how to get back to it. Note also those Forums all say edit this entry. I checked many times and re-saved them as Forum. I put one of them under another one to see if that would get it back and that is the one showing now at the top of the page.
Now, I never moved any template files or created a forum page or anything like that. Actually I tried that forum page thing and it didn’t do a thing for me.
What is it I am not doing correctly?
@jjj
I’m also seeing issues with the permalinks not flushing, fairly often. I have to go back and save them again and all is well. If there’s any info I can provide to help, let me know.
Jonathan
Does the BBpress plugin scale, to make it also interesting for our huge BBpress forum on http://www.onemorething.nl/community?
2M+ posts
60K users
160K topics
@Rick – No idea what you have going on there. Looks like /forum is loading your “General Discussion” forum, and then some stuff under it. Some kind of canonical redirect with a shortcode and a page slug maybe? It’s really hard to tell.
Hi,
Is there any documentation to explain how categories work?
I want to add a new topic to a category i have created but the category is greyed out in the dropdown and I can’t select it?
Here’s my demo forum http://www.dareboy.co.uk/forum/dareboy-forum
tks
james
@JJJ yeah for sure something has gone a muck there. Going to back track a bit. I started by going through the posts here and I keep seeing mentioned of setting up a page using a specific template. I don’t have that option when I setup a page and was sure I saw also somewhere that it was no longer needed. I did setup a page – Forums but without a template for it I doubt it is going me any good.
Also as James is asking above, I wouldn’t mind a little 411 on how the categories are suppose to work as well.
Coming from Vbulletin world for many years I was thinking category would be above the forum such as — Community Forums – Gaming forums — General Forums and so on. Then you setup Forums under those which house the topics. Doesn’t seem like it flows that way though.
Going to put some time into getting this corrected today as my users are finally making their way over from the old site and after years of having a forum many of them are lost.
Thanks for all the help and support.
++1 on more directions pertaining to categories.
suggestion:
I noticed that when I create a new category, I give it a title, and also type in a description into the wp post box. The description does not show up on the front end templates.
this does however work for sub-forums, where the description subtext shows up.
I do realize this is simply because the_content() is not called for categories on the template, but it would be a nice core addition.
*Some of us are going to be converting HUGE existing forums, where descriptions of even categories is kind of important.
also:
I am slowly starting to understand the template structure that the plugin uses. Needless to say it is quite different than I expected, and really takes template parts to a whole new level for me.
It would make bbpress life 10x easier, if there were a visual template guide reference available somewhere.
Nothing fancy, just a diagram showing each bbpress page, and the templates used to generate each area of the page.
I know a project like that is kind of a pain in the butt, however it would make life much easier for those of us making huge modifications.
finally:
Does this plugin currently tie into buddypress to replace the existing group forum structures?
-my ultimate goal is to use buddypress with the bbpress pluin. I’m waiting on bp 1.3 before I even attempt to add in bp to my site.
@anointed it does not work with bp group forums. I learned this from testing and breaking everything twice. Then JJJ confirmed earlier in this post when iasked about it.
I had setup groups with forums and integrated with bbpress. Work and looked nice. Converted by vbulletin sitr to phpbb the bbpress. Destroyed my integrated group forums and while all the data and users were there it looked terrible. No category structure at all. It also deleted all my WP users with the imported ones. Locked me out from admin as well. Not fun.
Since that I did it two other times with minor changes in how I did it and knowing what was goint to happen. I got the groups back working which for me is something I want for the groups. The forum will be a seperate componet once I get a handle on how to modify the phpbb to bbpress converter. I need it ti not import users. Or do so without killing my wp users.
Cleaning the forum data prio to import is also on the list. Once done I will use bbp to bbpress converter to make the final connection. That is where I am now with trying figure out the plugin and conversion process.
I actually tried converting bbpress to bbp with the integrated group forums. Got a page of notices and errors that could fill a novel. Surely I didn’t do it correctly as well as various other factors.
If we get a little guidance on the category and overall flow of things it will be helpful. I personally can wait to see this thing working on my site as some vbulletin reps were not very kind when I mentioned my move 6 months a go. They said you will never get your data moved and if you did it will never be as good.
My site is not even close to being up to par but is already better thab it was.
Categories are basically just forums you can’t post to. This mirrors existing bbPress behavior, and not existing (other forum platform) behavior. This is mostly just a presentation issue, so if you figure out a way to make it do what other platforms do, drop a patch in Trac. 
I don’t imagine it will difficult to make it do what you want, since it’s just opening and closing elements in the loop, but things will get confusing when nested and multiple child/sibling elements come into play. I remember this from my old phpBB days. 
Also, the code itself is very heavily documented. If you’re curious about the inner workings, dive in and take a look. Honestly, documenting bbPress.org will be largely a community effort once I get things setup here. I’ll contribute to get it off the ground and will always be around to help, but it’s hard to build everything and document everything too. The WordPress codex is the culmination of years of hundreds of developers chipping in, and both bbPress and BuddyPress will eventually have something similar.
i thought it was miller time but no dice. I moved the page template into my themes folder which I had not done and create a forum page.
http://crosseyedgaming.com/forum/
That gave me what looks more like a forum although I had that look within my theme at one point.
So looks good and off I went clicking on one of the forums. None of the links work!
I am sure this has to do with the setting as I believe I put forum or something in for the base. I notice though changing the slugs kills all the links???
Is this real?
That would suck to kill all the links in ones forum but it seems that is what happen. Please confirm if this is the case and if there is a fix.
Thank you.
If you *moved* all the page templates out of the bbp-twentyten folder, and did not *copy* them, then exactly what you’ve described will occur.
If you copied them, and did not explicitly add this snippet to your theme, exactly what you’ve described will occur:
add_theme_support( 'bbpress' );
If your permalinks were flushed by another plugin, it’s possible that bbPress’s rewrites got missed. This is a known issue, and I’m working on a fix. Visit Admin > Settings > Forums, and save them, which will force bbPress to flush the rewrite rules again.
yes copied. I am using a child theme. where do I add that code?
In your functions.php file for your theme.
How can we get informed when the plugin alpha becomes available?
I saw a list of shortcodes mentioned a few pages back.
I’ve been able to get [bbp-forum-index] to work easily.
How do i get the [bbp-single-forum] shortcode to work?
I’ve tried [bbp-single-forum id="# of the forum"] without luck?
Worked out how to do what i posted above.
Can someone please explain to me why this is happening?
http://stephenjohnmartin.com/spa/forums/forum/
I’m pretty sure this page is using archive.php, which i haven’t changed from the default TwentyTen theme.
I’ve had to create my own page named forums and insert the shortcode [[bbp-forum-index] in order to achieve what i want on the forums/forum page. It is located here:
http://stephenjohnmartin.com/spa/forums/
Basically, how do i make forums/forum appear the same as /forums, or, how do i remove the need for the forums/forum page?
Sorry i’m a rookie.
@CrownOfMars – There is no need for a ‘/forums’forum’ page, and it should be redirecting to a 404 page, using your 404.php template file. Because a forum is of the post type ‘forum’ that’s how WordPress knows what kind of content to serve up, what template to use, etc…
Thanks for your response. I have my 404.php setup to redirect to my homepage so i’m not sure what’s going on.
The thing is, when i switch back to the default TwentyTen theme forums/forum works as an achieve page with the heading “Blog Archives”.
Sorry if i’m confusing you!
