[mdolon]

Check it out: http://devgrow.com/discuss

It took about a week to get everything the way I wanted. At first I wanted to do a deep integration but it was too much of a pain, so I just ended up writing some custom code to cache most of my sidebar, header and footer elements from my blog and display the cached content in bbPress.

Plugins I’m using:

• Allow Images
• Auto Add to Favorites
• BBcode Lite
• Google Sitemap Generator
• Post Count Plus
• Post Count Plus for WordPress
• Subscribe to Topic
• Topic Icons
• Custom Plugin for Recent/Popular Topics

And some more custom code throughout the templates. Would love to answer questions or hear feedback!

[r-a-y]

Looks good! Also loads quite fast due to not using deep integration.

[zaerl]

I like it. Very clean theme.

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

I would love to hear the implementation details

[mdolon]

Thanks zaerl!

In terms of integration, I connected the databases between WP and bbPress during installation and made sure that the cookie information matched in both configuration files (bb-config and wp-config). Those two steps made it so when a user registered and logged in at my forum, they were logged in at my blog too.

I didn’t really need any of the WordPress functions in bbPress so I skipped the deep integration part (calling wp-load). The only bit of dynamic code in my header is checking to see if a user is logged in, and on WordPress you can do that with:

<?php if(is_user_logged_in()){?>

Do something

<?php } ?>

I use caching to load the sidebar and footer. When someone visits my main site, http://devgrow.com/, it creates a cache of the sidebar and footer if there is no existing cache or if it’s older than 6 hours. The cache is just a text file that contains the output of the dynamic bits in my sidebar in HTML format, which I just include in my bbPress sidebar and footer.

I also wrote some custom code to pull the recent and popular (most replies) topics and display them with their topic icons.

Hope that makes sense, let me know if you have any other questions.

[chrishajer]

Just rescued this post from Akismet.

[mdolon]

Thanks r-a-y for the compliments, and thanks chrishajer for resuscitating the post!