Hello, My name is Darren. I am the Team Leader of the New Eden School Student Portal Team. I have been looking to add a forum for our students into our Portal. We had a forum before but had to shut it down for some reasons i will not go into. However we now want to re-initialize our forum idea and place it into our portal. My question is this:
We need a forum that has all the features that a forum system includes, such as:
Adding/Creating Threads by both Student and Admins. Instructors also need to be able to create them.
We do not want external links like Share to facebook and such. As this is a forum in a portal and do not want anyone but Students having access to it.
We do not want a profiling. We already have a profile system where the profile in wordpress is their student profile which includes their address, email, username, phone number and also their student id. This information cannot be visible to other students.
So either if this plugin gives an external profile system where it does not interact with the profile already made in the USERS area of wordpress it would work, but if it works with the USERS part of wordpress then the clickable link to view a profile, edit profile would need to be removed for our sake.
We also do not want another log in. We want them to be able to log into their profile in our student portal and that is it. They have access to the forum aswell and no additional login or registering, as right now we pre-create their profiles, no one registers.

Let me know if the above is possible to customize in this plugin,
thanks,
-NES Portal Management Team Leader

[@netweb Keymaster 8 years, 2 months ago]

bbPress shares WordPress’ users settings, you an see an example of it for your own bbPress.org and WordPress.org profiles here:

https://bbpress.org/forums/profile/darrenbergman93/
https://profiles.wordpress.org/darrenbergman93/

When logging into bbPress it is just logging into WordPress with the same username and password so you should be good to go there also 🙂

[@robkk Moderator 8 years, 2 months ago]

@darrenbergman93

We also do not want another log in. We want them to be able to log into their profile in our student portal and that is it. They have access to the forum aswell and no additional login or registering, as right now we pre-create their profiles, no one registers.

Like @netweb said bbPress and WordPress share user data, so as long as your student portal is compatible with WordPress it should be fine. You do not need a separate login for the forum as long as the student login, logs into your WordPress site.

We need a forum that has all the features that a forum system includes, such as:
Adding/Creating Threads by both Student and Admins. Instructors also need to be able to create them.
We do not want external links like Share to facebook and such. As this is a forum in a portal and do not want anyone but Students having access to it.

Ok, you can manually create users and assign different forum roles if need be. And you can create custom forum roles with help form a code snippet. You definitely need private forums, but I am not sure how private. Do you want private user groups for specific forums, only logged in users can see the forums, or only logged in users can see the whole site.

We do not want a profiling. We already have a profile system where the profile in wordpress is their student profile which includes their address, email, username, phone number and also their student id. This information cannot be visible to other students.
So either if this plugin gives an external profile system where it does not interact with the profile already made in the USERS area of wordpress it would work, but if it works with the USERS part of wordpress then the clickable link to view a profile, edit profile would need to be removed for our sake.

There is a php code snippet around these forums to remove the author link in replies and topics from going to their profile and instead show up in the forum as text. Removing profile links in descriptions and a widget might need another code snippet, or it could be easily avoidable by not using a widget and removing the descriptions.

bbPress doesn’t add any additional user meta fields if I remember correctly.

Removing the profiles, I haven’t looked at what code you could possibly need, but it could be possibly avoidable by redirecting any user forum profiles (if users somehow reach them) to somewhere else.