I just spent about 8 frustrating hours failing to accomplish a very basic task with bbpress.

I want my forums & their descriptions grouped grouped by category on the index page. A long jumble of forums on different topics, only ever displayed in “most recently updated” order, or alternatively without displaying the forum descriptions, is totally unusable. I don’t want people to have to hunt through subpages to find which forum is correct to post in for an issue.

I just want an index page that shows ALL the information: Forum titles, Categories, and Descriptions, for all forums, on a page. In some sort of order that isn’t going to leave the users scratching their heads as to where to find what they want. Is that really too advanced to expect bb software to do?

Some sort of organization, on the index page, or at least headings, is really a basic feature of, uh, every single forum I’ve ever seen. Organizing information into sensible sections been a fundamental part of information design since… the printing press? The written word? Hieroglyphics? I don’t know. But bbpress’s index page is an unfriendly, unusable mess, and the only feature you provide for grouping forums makes the situation worse, not better.

I went with a plugin based solution because I didn’t want to sit and code a solution myself. After spending all day on this problem, I am aware that there are complicated, far-over-my-head solutions which may or may not work, telling me I must do things I don’t understand, and which sound to me like they may be wiped out and need to be re-entered every time a theme or plugin is updated.

I can’t put any more time into this simple need. We have multiple users in my group who are going to be able to create new categories and forums, and it needs to _just_work_ , and display an index that makes sense to users, without hours upon hours of troubleshooting and administration.

[@jaredatch Member 12 years, 6 months ago]

bbPress does “just work” – pretty well actually.

Unfortunately it doen’t just work to everyones’ specifications, for example splitting up the all the information like you are referring to.

bbPress is simple and lean. However part of that simplicity factor is it doesn’t have all the options out of the box like some of the other suites have.

You can do what you want by creating a custom theme. If you’re coding chops aren’t that big then there are tons other possible solutions that might fit your need better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software_(PHP)

[@kirby23 Member 12 years, 6 months ago]

It also has broken links, and will not let any users (including me, the administrator) view or add topics! I’ve spend a whole night, the following day, and the better part of the following evening trying to set up this software. It doesn’t “just work”, it doesn’t work at all. This is horribly broken right out of the box.

This isn’t an issue of “options”. Being able to post in a forum, or to read existing topics, isn’t “optional” in a bb, it’s the very core of what a bb is supposed to do, and 24 hours after starting this process, including spenting 3 hours since my last post googling for an answer and searching this forum, I have not been able to enable that most crucial functionality. All the forum pages do is give a topic count, but the topics are hidden, can’t be read or added to. Not a single solution I have found in those 3 hours has fixed it.

A forum that even an administrator can’t view or post to is the very heighth of “doesn’t work”. Add the default broken breadcrumb links, and that brings bbpress down to less than zero stars. And I am done wasting my time. I’m not risking putting this in front of my users. No further responses are necessary, I’m not giving a single second more of my attention to this unusably broken time-wasting trash.

Thank you for the link to other alternatives.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 12 years, 6 months ago]

Clearly links that don’t function isn’t normal; if everyone had this issue, 200k other bbPress users wouldn’t be using bbPress. Sorry if bbPress didn’t do what you expected, but it’s working great for many others.

Overall, it sounds like your theme is the culprit, and that you don’t like the way it looks. That’s a design decision; one that you will need to solve on your own if you don’t like the default styling.

bbPress has never tried to be exactly like “all the other forum software.” The philosophy is to be the smallest and simplest to use, and I think it accomplishes that pretty well inside of WordPress. If it’s missing things you wanted or expected, you are free to build those things yourself.

Thanks for the feedback.