I want to create a custom landing page which displays my forums.

I have created a page with the bbPress shorcode [bbp-forum-index] which works fine.

However, the breadcrumb “forums” link goes to a different page which contains a load of text jibberish!

I changed the forums slug in the settings to my page (and updated the permalinks) but instead of the breadcrumb link going to the page with the shortcode, the page itself gets over-written by the text jibberish.

It actually looks like the bbPress sidebar is loading into the main content field, though i don’t know why or how to fix.

Page with shortcode > activenaturalist.org.uk/anforum/
Forums breadcrumb text jibberish > activenaturalist.org.uk/fmsforum/

If anyone thinks this post looks familiar it is because i posted about something similar in the past then went under siege from a Chinese bot, the website has only recently been allowed back up by my host.

WP 3.6.1
bbPress 2.4

[@niuserre Participant 11 years, 2 months ago]

The breadcrumb uses the default Forum Index even if you use a shortcode to display your forum so it will always link back to the automatically created Forum Index.

If you only need the shortcode method because of the template problem then let’s fix the template so you don’t need the shortcode.

From: https://codex.bbpress.org/theme-compatibility/getting-started-in-modifying-the-main-bbpress-template/

On a plain vanilla install of bbPress using a “normal” wordpress theme, the plugin looks for the following templates from the active wordpress theme and “injects” the forum into (i guess) the first one it finds:

‘plugin-bbpress.php’,
‘bbpress.php’,
‘forums.php’,
‘forum.php’,
‘generic.php’,
‘page.php’

I’m guessing your theme doesn’t have one of those so bbPress appears to be using some kind of archive template.

You need to give bbPress a theme template to hook into. In your theme folder (or in a child theme if you want to do auto-updates with your theme) create a bbpress.php template, you can probably just create a duplicate of one of your theme templates and change its name.

Here’s my bbpress.php template: http://pastebin.com/ZquKQfmw (Adept is my theme name, hence @package Adept). I took my theme’s full width template and duplicated it, called it bbpress.php then changed the header information. bbPress will figure out the rest.

[@halydris Participant 11 years, 2 months ago]

Thanks for this. I have had a go this morning and tried adding a bbpress.php duplicate of several different files (index, post, page..) none of which seemed to make a difference.

Apparently the Customizr theme structure is a little complex and the theme is split in parts, i can’t say i understand all that much but that seems to be the problem!

At least for now i have gone with a function which removes the “forums” breadcrumb and prevents linking to that page which i have replaced with the static page containing shortcodes.

[@critchy Participant 9 years, 10 months ago]

Did anybody find a way to make this work, I have a theme with exactly the same issue and cannot seem to find the correct page template to hook into. Is there another way to solve this? The forum main index and subsequent bbpress pages all display correct just minus the search box and login links etc. If I use the short code they do display correctly.