A lot of bbPress forums have taken advantage of easy user integration with WordPress. The next step to integrating a WordPress blog and bbPress Forum is to create a bbPress Theme to match your WordPress Theme. bbPress doesn’t ship with built-in support for a sidebar, although I found it trivial to add this with a small plugin. What I really missed was a lightweight way to access WordPress’ wp_list_bookmarks Template Tag function, which lets you display your WordPress Blogroll links.

To add this functionality, I wrote this bbPress List Bookmarks plugin. To install this plugin, download the zip and unzip it to your bbPress server under your /my-plugins folder. The zip should extract to a folder named “list_bookmarks”, so the location of these files should be /my-plugins/list_bookmarks. Then, in your bbPress theme, add a wp_list_bookmarks Template Tag with whatever parameters you want (just like you would when editing a WordPress Theme). You shouldn’t need to hack any of the plugin files to get this to work, although of course you’ll have to edit your bbPress Theme to take advantage of this plugin.

This plugin should work whether or not these WordPress tables are located in the same database as your bbPress tables, as long as your WordPress tables are located in the same database as your integrated user tables.

I’ve tested this plugin on my site, which currently uses bbPress v0.8.2.1 and WordPress v2.2.1. If you use WordPress 2.0 or earlier and you want to use this plugin, you should probably upgrade your WordPress first as wp_list_bookmarks is a new function introduced in WordPress v2.1. I don’t think it should matter what version of bbPress you use.

This plugin ships with a database class called bbwpdb.php that lets us access the WordPress database tables. The bbwpdb.php file is basically a clone of the bbPress /bb-includes/db.php file, edited to let us retrieve WordPress tables. The remaining files are simply three WordPress PHP pages needed (wp-admin/admin-db.php, wp-includes/bookmark-templates.php, and wp-includes/bookmark.php), with slight edits to make it use the bbwpdb database class, instead of the WordPress or bbPress database class. The last file (list_bookmarks.php) just glues everything together.

[@jphill77 Member 15 years, 5 months ago]

bobby, is this plugin still available (or something similar)? It’s an exact solution that I was looking for. I went to your site but it’s down, and I don’t know where else to download that plugin. Would you be able to post it again or email it to me?

[@rgurtzman09 Member 15 years, 5 months ago]

I would also like to know if this plugin is still available. Could you post a download link?

Thnx in advance…

[@bobbyh Member 15 years, 5 months ago]

Haha, two people asked for this in one day after two years of no interest…

Here’s the download link: http://www.kosmosity.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/list_bookmarks.zip

To be honest, I haven’t looked at this in two years. It doesn’t have any dependencies on bbPress, though, so it should still work. Let me know!

[@jphill77 Member 15 years, 5 months ago]

Activation of the plugin failed for me. I got this message..

“Plugin could not be activated; it produced a Fatal Error.”

Would you happen to know of any other solutions?

[@bobbyh Member 15 years, 5 months ago]

Are you using bbpress 1.0? I hope not, because I wrote that that plugin for 0.8. Also, what version of WordPress are you using?

Also, what version of PHP do you use, is your bbpress integrated with WordPress (not “deep integration”, just “user table integration”. Basically, you have to tell me something about your setup for me to offer any help at all.

[@jphill77 Member 15 years, 5 months ago]

I am using WordPress MU 2.7.1, and BBpress 0.9.0.5 with PHP 5. I have the user table integration as well.

[@_ck_ Participant 15 years, 5 months ago]

It’s a very heavyweight plugin that duplicates the functionality that’s already in WP.

What you should do is either write the output of the function from WP to a file and simply do a readfile from the bbPress side, or write it into the WP options table with autoload turned off and fetch it from the bbpress side via a single query.

[@jphill77 Member 15 years, 5 months ago]

ck, no idea how I’d go about doing that, but I will look into that solution. Still open to other ideas as well.