Havent found definitive answers anywhere since most everyone who has tried to install a bbPress theme to a current version of the bbPress plugin for WP has discovered that the stock instructions on the bbPress.org wiki and elsewhere are outdated/wrong. If you are not using stock TwentyTen as your parent theme, bbPress theming is broken out of the box – you get a theme broken/not installed message from your admin panel.

When bbPress thusly reverts to its stock look it’s ugly, unusable, and broken. Currently my forums at txmma.com/forum do not work properly as a result. when you drill down and actually try to read a topic you cannot. no content comes up. That’s outside of the fact that aesthetically there’s nothing there you would want to use.

I was wondering if anyone has successfully installed a third party bbPress theme or rolled their own, with the plugin version of bbPress, when using a custom WordPress theme (i.e. not TwentyTen).

Copying the theme files as directed in the bbPress.org instructions is useless as many have discovered.

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 12 years, 5 months ago]

Yes, many people have done this successfully.

bbp-theme-compat isn’t a complete theme; it says so in the files and in the documentation. I’d recommend trying the instructions again. If you’ve tried them enough times and still can’t figure it out, I’d love to know which points we can clarify for you further. The general “it’s broke and ugly and help” isn’t indicative to us where you need our help.