Dear all, thanks a lot for all your effort and great piece of work!

I am stuck in trouble… I am still trying hard to create my own custom template and I am observing strange bbpress behaviour. In order to customize my bbpress template I have copied all “extras” files from bbpress plugin to my custom template. When edited, the public outcome is as expected… I am able to modify the copied “extras” files and all the changes are visible. So everything seems to be OK.

BUT… The “page-front-forums.php” index file is ignored by my wordpress site. When edited, no changes are visible on the front end. I have tried to call the index file page-front-forums.php using shortcode. It is working fine, all changes in page-front-forums.php working as expected. Strange, isnt is?:-) Why?

All other “extras” files/pages seem to be sent to front end visible with customizations and working as expected.

Thanks for your advice!

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 12 years, 5 months ago]

page-front-forums.php is a page template. You need to set the template in the edit page screen.

[@viktora Member 12 years, 5 months ago]

Hi John, this is what I did when using the shortcode in my page created with slug /forums-test/. It worked well. But what if I do not want to use the shortcodes? The /forums/ page is ignoring my customized page-front-forums.php. I tried to edit the page slug from /forums-test/ to /forums/ but the system is insisting on slug /forums-2/ (created automatically by the system). How should I make the bbpress to use my customized page-front-forums.php file on /forums/? Ideally without shortcodes?

I tried to change the slug for

[@viktora Member 12 years, 5 months ago]

One more strange observation. In admin area I have modified the Forum base slug to different than /forums/, te us say to /discussion/. What is the bbpress doing?

If the old (and theoretically not existing) page /forums/ is called, the customized file page-front-forums.php is shown OK.

But if you call the new /discussion/, page-front-forums.php is ignored.

Really strange. Isnt it a bug?

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 12 years, 5 months ago]

No bugs here; it sounds like you’re just doing it all incorrectly, and what you see is what you get. 🙂

For your installation, you should probably pick 1 method of having a forum index that works for you, and use only that one. If you don’t want to use shortcodes, and would rather use a page template, then just do that way. Don’t make 1 page with a shortcode, and another at the forum root, an another here and another there.

[@viktora Member 12 years, 5 months ago]

No John.:-) I was using multiple methods for displaying my forum just for testing purpose. Now, the status is that I do NOT have any page with shortcode. I just modified the Forum base slug to /discussion/. Suddenly the historical /forums/ forum base slug started to work in the way I expected and the new slug /discussion/ works in the same wrong way as /forums/ did before.

Couple of questions:
Why is the /forums/ slug working after it was modified in the admin area (forum base slug)? It should not be visible at all.
Why is the new /discussion/ forum base slug ignoring page-front-forums.php file? Compared to the /forums/ slug which accepts whe template file ok.

[@viktora Member 12 years, 5 months ago]

Another observation + summary to the topic “bbpress is ignoring my customized index page file page-front-forums.php in my template directory”…

Default setup for forum base slug is “forums”. With this setup page-front-forums.php is being ignored. After change to “discussions”, the /discussion/ URL still ignores the template file BUT /forums/ URL is still working and it is working fine! (no shortcode usage).

BUT only for logged in users.:-)) Other users are redirected to web index page.

Anyway, I am happy to have at least some progress here.:-))

[@judeaaz Member 12 years, 4 months ago]

Same problem for me !
bbpress is configured to use /forums/ slug to view forums index page. But this page /forums/ gets the page.php file of my theme ! Just for header, nav, and title. Juste after the title, bbpress files are recognized.
Also, single forum view gets the single.php file of my theme.

[@judeaaz Member 12 years, 4 months ago]

John, I read a message of you in another thread where you say :

> That said, what you want to do is as easy as making a bbpress.php
> template in the root of your theme. It will act as the wrapper for all
> bbPress content.

What does that mean ? I’ve read the codex, but not this in there.
Thank you