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Process to adapt a theme for bbpress?

  • Can someone please walk me through the process to adapt a theme to bbpress? I have been able to use the TwentyTen bbpress them successfully and I love it. But, I’ve tried just installing the plugin with other themes to no avail because the page templates do not show when creating a new forum page.

    I know it involves copying the files from TwentyTen/bbpress but I am not sure where and what other steps are involved.

    I am a newbie, but, I can modify css if needed.

    Many thanks.

    Bob

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • baldg0at
    Participant

    @baldg0at

    Here’s a real basic rundown of what I did.

    Add this to your theme’s functions.php file

    add_theme_support( ‘bbpress’ );

    Create a Child theme for your current theme — https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

    Copy the files from plugins>bbpress>bbp-themes>bbp-twentyten into your child theme folder.

    Go to your WP Admin and activate your child theme

    Edit the child theme as needed to match your site. You may be able to get by with just editing yourchildtheme>css>bbpress.css, but you can change any of the theme files to make the forums look however you want.

    Thank you for that. I am going to try that tonight on my practice site and will let you know how it works.

    Isn’t it crazy that those instructions aren’t part of the basic bbpress documents or FAQ?

    A couple of questions, does it matter if I do that before or after installing and activating bbpress?

    And, should the child theme contain the modified functions.php? If it doesn’t wouldn’t the modifications get blown away during a theme upgrade?

    Thanks

    Well after a couple hours I couldn’t get it to work. I followed the instructions but I made the following adjustment. I created a new functions.php in the child folder with the line

    add_theme_support( ‘bbpress’ );

    It all seemed to work but when I created a page and wanted to use a bbpress template only the template for the theme showed up, none for bbpress.

    Your instructions say

    “Copy the files from plugins>bbpress>bbp-themes>bbp-twentyten into your child theme folder.”

    Does this mean that you can just dump the whole thing, including subdirectories in, or do certain things go certain places?

    Anyone have some thoughts?


    baldg0at
    Participant

    @baldg0at

    <i>A couple of questions, does it matter if I do that before or after installing and activating bbpress?</i>

    Doesn’t matter

    <i>And, should the child theme contain the modified functions.php?</I>

    No. Both the functions file in your parent theme and your child theme will load. No need to copy on to the other.

    <i>”Copy the files from plugins>bbpress>bbp-themes>bbp-twentyten into your child theme folder.”

    Does this mean that you can just dump the whole thing, including subdirectories in, or do certain things go certain places?</i>

    You should dump everything as-is, otherwise things will likely break.


    BobHatcher
    Participant

    @bobhatcher

    Well, I am revisiting this and I appreciate baldg0at’s help. But, I have another question.

    If after creating my child theme which has a style.css in it that inherits the characteristics of the parent theme, and then I

    “Copy the files from plugins>bbpress>bbp-themes>bbp-twentyten into your child theme folder.”

    Won’t I then have the style.css from the bbp-twentyten theme and not the style.css that allows the child to inherit the parent’s theme characteristics?

    This is very confusing.


    BobHatcher
    Participant

    @bobhatcher

    Ok, well, I figured it out. There are two things you need to worry about when you dump the contents of the bbp-twentyten theme into your child theme folder.

    1) The style.css file for bbp-twentyten will overwrite your child theme style.css and that’s the one that tells it to inherit the parent theme’s characteristics. So, what I did was to rename the bbp-twentyten style.css to style-bbpresstwentyten.css before I copied all the files in.

    2) The file screenshot.png which is the image that will show on your Themes page will get overwritten too. If you don’t delete or rename that file you will be very confused when you go to the Themes page because you’ll probably be looking for a screenshot of your child theme, not of bbpress twentyten. So, again, I renamed the file in the bbpress-twentyten directory to screenshot-bbpresstwentyten.png

    Hopes this helps some others.

    Bob

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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