Heeeeeeelp Please.. 
haha!
Yes, I’m in the same situation with the Mingle theme from ThemeForest, for my site at http://www.geekandjock.com
Great theme and styling which looks like cr*p when viewed with the bbPress plugin. Seems like the forum capability for WordPress is still in the dark ages, in my opinion.
I’ve migrated from Drupal to WordPress recently. I’d have thought that plugins would respect and act like child components of any theme being used for WordPress. Sadly, this sort of logic isn’t the case.
I’ve scoured the bbPress forums and styling seems to be the major problem as well as requiring a whole lot of work and effort, not to mention it also appears (to me) to be a convoluted exercise. This is my major regreat in migrating from Drupal to WordPress.
@seancam4
Without a link to your site, there is nothing we can do to help out.
@Rastarr
Can I ask what it is about the bbPress theme that you don’t like on your site?
From the quick peek that I took, it does seem to be setup correctly. If it’s just some small tweaks then maybe it’s something I can help with. (not tonight, it’s 3:30am my time, but maybe later).
Hey Anointed.
Thanks for your nice reply and offer to help out if you’re able.
Here’s a list of what I find lacking as far as theming goes in my current them.
– the forum descriptions are missing, other than the first one.
– there’s no borders defining the layout of forums and sub-forums
– the styling of the avatars isn’t carried over from the main them
– indented comment threading (though this might be a shortcoming of bbPress itself)
– I’d personally like to get rid of that ‘Freshness’ column too. Reasoning: when you’re trying to get increased activity in a forum that has a lack, seeing a bold indicator that it’s slow has a tendency to keep people away (that’s just a marketing point of view)
– the fonts, Title styling, icons and shadows
– check out the same theme’s style for BuddyPress here – http://para.llel.us/themes/mingle-wp/groups/web-design/forum/
– you can see that’s simply beautiful.
– it’s a great pity there’s so much confusion around BuddyPress, bbPress and how it’s made out that they’re integrated with WordPress until you come to discovering there’s so much that isn’t transferred from WP into a plugin like bbPress.
Anyway, ideally it would have been fantastic if the theme creator had done bbPress as well as BuddyPress however that isn’t going to happen as he says it’s too much work. As a relative newbie to WordPress, I simply wasn’t aware there were these sorts of pitfalls – I naively thought theming was a global site thing [groan]
Thanks
Martin
There truly is no way to build a plugin like bbPress that would integrate with any theme on the market and take on the themes characteristics perfectly.
Because of that what bbPress has done is to build a very basic structure that is not to difficult to extend to fit your own theme. Yes, it does take a lot of work, but in the end it is very easy and run to work with.
Most of what you are asking for could be accomplished with just a bit of css work. It would take a ton of work to make it look exactly like your forums, but making bbPress look decent in the theme wouldn’t be that hard. Mostly just time is all.
It looks like you didn’t add descriptions to
health, mind, and relationships. If you add descriptions for those ‘categories’ then the descriptions will show up.
The theme by default does not show descriptions of sub-forums on the homepage, though it could be modified to show them.
First time I’ve seen that theme. It’s very nice looking
**I sent you a contact form on your website with a bunch of css you can apply to make bbPress look better on your site
Thanks so much for your help, Shawn.
At least now the forums have some framework and don’t look like a blank page
I added a description to the Relationships forum and it’s weird how the subforum titles show first and then the main forum description – I guess that’s some CSS stuff at play again.
Yeah, it’s a great looking theme indeed.
@Rastarr – Your site is looking much better than mine 
but i’ve noticed you have one of the same problems that I do– the weird numbers ( i.e. (3, 4),). @ Anointed – any idea how to solve this?
http://www.gogo-gringo.com/forums
Mine’s a mess and I can’t find anyone to help 
@tnwinn
The numbers represent topics/replies for each forum so if it says (3,4) that means there are 3 topics and 4 replies in that forum.
Also, I would suggest maybe upgrading bbPress to the latest nightly vs. as it does not use tables.
https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/branches/plugin
download link is on the bottom of the page.
***BACKUP YOUR SITE***
The nightly beta has been just fine for me and others, but as always backup first.
Your right, your forums look horrible. I’m kinda hoping that the new theme built into the new vs. of bbPress might help you out.
Also, your theme is from a decent company, I’d also go over there and ask them for a little bit of help with the styles. There is nothing conflicting that I see, but for some reason your tables are all evenly spaced which is why the homepage looks so bad. The new theme does not use tables, so it might help.
@Rastarr
Yeah, the descriptions layout is confusing. It’s just how it’s setup to display. It is ‘fixable’ but is way beyond the time I have to invest in fixing. Either way, your forums look a little better now. At least you have more of a base to start tweaking it. Glad it helped.
Anointed, thanks for the response. I’m not seeing a DL link at the bottom of the page you sent me though ? (I’m not super dense, I swear )Cheers.
I’m also getting all kinds of page errors with the current set up (like here: http://www.gogo-gringo.com/forum/rants-amp-raves/recommendations), and it jumps back and forth btwn my old standalone (…/forum) and my new forums (…/forums). I think I’m in over my head on this one. ?
@tnwinn
Mate, the forum looks bloody great!
And I see the sue forums are displaying descriptions as well. How did you manage that? Is that due to using some latest bbPress version or something?
@Rastarr
if you look at twwinn’ site you will see 2 forums
http://www.gogo-gringo.com/forums = new bbPress 2x
http://www.gogo-gringo.com/forum = old bbPress standalone 1x vs.
It’s the 2x that he is trying to fix. There is no link on his site to get to the new forums, the button you are clicking on ‘forum’ is his old forum which he is trying to fix.
Oh right, gotcha.
Yeah, the v2 bbPress forums look nowhere as good as the standalone ones.
I thought something might have been fixed in an updated bbPress release – not to be
Yup, I am still linking the standalone to our site until we can (hopefully) get the plugin up to par.
Anointed – your screenshot is prompting me to DL Screensnapr, and the DL link isn’t currently working..
Wish you the best of luck with the v2.x forums, tnwinn
Interesting bbPress theme at http://www.binaryturf.com/forum/ which has sub forums and descriptions, for anyone’s interest.
