[theurbantwist]

I like a lot of you on here obviously want bbpress to be implemented into my site.

And I like a lot of you have been having issues getting everything installed and working correctly.

I’m writing this post because I got things going finally on my site and it really isn’t as hard as I was making it and some of you are from what I’m seeing.

I just wanted to share a few simple things that I learned along my journey and hopefully this post can steer some of you in the right direction.

My forum is located at http://www.theurbantwist.com/community by the way. Ignore banner at top of page as that’s just a placeholder for when I get my official forum logo designed.

First things first…

I followed the instructions to a “t” from this post:

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-20-theme-compatibility

I have a custom theme, so I copied all files over, created child theme and all of that jazz, and added theme support.

At this point I just knew that I was going to be finished because when I went to dashboard, it stated that my theme now had bbpress support. Everything was coming together just as how the instructions above would lead me to believe.

The feeling was brief as when I actually went to the forum page, it was completely blank other than the breadcrumb trail at the top…my header and footer was present but everything else in the middle (the content area) was gone.

So me being familiar with wordpress themes and because I’m so used to “pimping” out themes for wordpress…I tried to do the same with bbpress, so I dissected and went over the code in those files I copied over into my main theme as if it were a wordpress theme and changed some things around thinking I needed to add some template tags here and there to get forum to work.

I did all of that and guess what? Nothing changed…same blank space as before.

So I then went into the plugin file itself and tried modifying the theme from there.

Still…nothing changed.

So I went backwards through the steps and started deleting steps to get back to where I was at originally and along the way, after I removed the theme support for bbpress, the forum showed up on my page. The CSS wasn’t matching my theme, but at least I had a start.

I then modified my css file to match certain elements of the twenty-ten default bbpress theme and mow I’m making progress. The theme is pretty much right where I want it be.

The only thing that was missing was that I wanted a topic listing of all topics on forum front page.

And here is where things really got easy and I wish I would have done this from the start.

I simply created a page.

I named page “community” to match my forum settings and I added 2 lines of code.

[bbp-forum-index]

[bbp-topic-index]

And voila! Now I have forum just the way I want it barring a couple of graphical changes which I’m working on.

The reason I went in detail about how I came to a solution for myself is that sometimes we do a LOT of unecessary stuff to get to where we need to be. I’ve wasted a LOT of time trying to manipulate the plugins files and my theme’s files, when all I needed to do was to create a page.

Bottom line and this is definitely something you should try if you are having problems.

1. Install and activate plugin.

2. Add a Page

3. Add those 2 lines of code above.

4. Publish.

You then have your forum. And that’s a start.

Cheers!

[John James Jacoby]

Thanks a ton for this.

[theurbantwist]

No problem my man! I’ve wasted a lot of time on this and just thought that maybe if I gave my story, people will see how easy and simple this really is.

It’s just that it took me a while to figure that out for myself, lol.

[kineticllc]

I went this route too – BUT…

My problem was a bit like yours – whitespace on the site after install.

I have a theme I bought and after getting this plugin to work fine right out of the box (so to speak) on another purchased theme I thought it would be fine for this site. Anyway, after I installed this and set up a forum and few topics I went thru the site and noticed the forum pages would break (not the rest of the site just forum pages) – at the breadcrumb for the main site (not the bbp breadcrumb). Header would show, but no footer, nothing after the breadcrumb start. If I disable the breadcrumbs in the main theme everything is fine – course what I’d rather do is turn off the breadcrumbs for BBPress. I might not have searched the forum enough, but I love to know how to disable (not just hide) the bbp breadcrumb. Well I guess I would love to what’s causing the conflict, but there aren’t any errors being thrown and I don’t have the patience to investigate this out without some help. I’ve also contacted the theme maker but I thought I’d give this a try too.

John, if your out there, a little insight perhaps?

[John James Jacoby]

@kineticlic – If I understand correctly, you’re saying you want to turn off the bbPress breadcrumb and use the one that comes with the theme? By doing this, chances are the theme’s breadcrumb won’t understand what to do with the bbPress specific pages.

[kineticllc]

I got a little more info from the theme (Sofa OPNPress from ThemeForest) owner… these are his words exactly:

“Yeap, I’m afraid breadcrumbs will not work with BBpress. And I think there’s no function or a plugin that will actually do the job properly. This theme is using Dimox breadcrumbs function (see http://sum.mx/4apyd2). Maybe you could ask for author advice on that subject… as far as I can see all the breadcrumbs logic relies on if-else clauses and if there’s a clause that can be used to “detect” BBpress – you are on the horse.”

To answer your question, and I’m sure I’m over simplifying, I guess I was just going to use short codes to get the forums to show up and then rely on the built in breadcrumbs to do their job. But if I could figure out at least what is causing the conflict and causing the page to break the I could fix that and if 2 breadcrumbs were show I’d settle for that. Or, said a different way, if the main site breadcrumbs are more important to me than the forum breadcrumbs if that makes sense.

I’m more of a frontend coder with the ability to do minor tweaking to existing function files which is why I’ve gotten to this point. It’s a bit over my head on how best to address it. I hate being the unique scenario guy but would love to use bbpress for facilitating my community interaction. Any more help is deeply appreciated.

Thanks!!

[kineticllc]

quick note: if you click the embedded link you need to remove the trailing paren to make the url valid.

[BOEW]

I am shocked that this worked. I have been driving myself insane doing a million things and now it works. Thank you for taking the time to share.