I am trying to configure bbpress for one way announcements to an audience of members in my website. Meaning I as the author am posting topics in chronological order, with no possibility of replies. So not a normal forum.

This has meant removing a lot of extraneous information normally displayed: I don’t need or want author, freshness, voices, etc.

I am new to WordPress, BBpress, and I am not a coder. I have proceeded, through trial and error, to “inspect” the pages and use custom CSS to hide objects that I don’t want (display: none !important), and to look at the php files such as content-single-topic-lead.php and remove any references to author (e.g. bbp-topic-author).

Without understanding much of what I’m doing, I’m getting very close to achieving the intended effect. Now I’m stuck because when someone clicks in Resource Messages (the “forum” name) on an actual topic, they see an indented display of content, because the author column (which normally displays author name and avatar etc, which I hid using CSS display: none !important) is still present (if empty).

Please see https://devgo.jeffbelkora.com/square/topic/20181219-resource-message-2/

So my questions are:
1. Can anyone instruct me on how to remove that first author/avatar column?
2. How to resize column 2, or otherwise adapt it so each topic’s content displays as a left-justified text?

Please be very remedial in any tips you can give me. I have created a “bbpress” subfolder inside my “astra” child theme via “files” in my cpanel. I am deleting code in php files there adding custom css inside the astra child theme “customizer”.

If you are going to suggest changing files, could you please specify how I need to place them in my child theme to make this futureproof to updates etc.?

Thank you!

[@robin-w Moderator 6 years, 1 month ago]

ok, that is quite ambitious, so well done for getting so far.

As I think you are doing, you should only change files in the templates and then only by copying them to a bbpress folder in your child theme. The originals can (and should) stay in the bbpress plugin file. bbpress will see your files in the child theme and use them instead.

to move the topic content – the word ‘test’ in your example

#bbpress-forums div.bbp-forum-content, #bbpress-forums div.bbp-reply-content, #bbpress-forums div.bbp-topic-content {
	margin-left: 0px !important;
}