[mikeybayer]

Hi all —
I’ve gotten BBpress pretty well set up on my site, but just noticed that when I conduct a search of the forums using the bbpress native search button, the results are plain text with no ability to link to the topic or reply. That seems bizarre, so I wonder if I’m doing something wrong. Anyone else deal with this? Is there something simple that I’m missing? – Mike

[Robin W]

so if you click the ‘support’ tab on this page, and enter a search, you will see that you can link from the topic – does your site do something different?

[mikeybayer]

Thanks for your reply. No, I don’t see that. Not sure if you can see my link below, but it shows the results of one of my searches. One result and nothing is clickable, not the orange title of the topic nor any of the words in the excerpt. Any thoughts?

Search for Casablanca

Actually, I misspoke. The orange title of the result IS clickable but it just links to the search result, doesn’t go anywhere.

[Robin W]

This is possibly because in the bbPress default theme package, there is a template called content-search.php. In some newer themes there is also a template of the same name. And since the bbPress templates don’t necessarily need to be in a bbPress folder, the bbPress plugin is choosing the template from your theme before the template that is actually in bbPress.

so if you have access to FTP, find
wp-content/plugins/bbpress/templates/default/bbpress/content-search.php

transfer this to your pc and save

create a directory on your theme called ‘bbpress’
ie wp-content/themes/%your-theme-name%/bbpress

where %your-theme-name% is the name of your theme

Then transfer the file you saved above and put in in the directory called bbpress that you created above, so you end up with
wp-content/themes/%your-theme-name%/bbpress/content-search.php

bbPress will now use this template instead of the original

[mikeybayer]

Wow, this is so incredibly helpful and detailed. Thank you very much.

[Robin W]

if it doesn’t work, come back !!

[mikeybayer]

Welp, I did this and purged all my cache, and it doesn’t seem to have worked. Any other suggestions?

[Robin W]

what theme are you using?

[mikeybayer]

Elementor hello theme — whole site is built with Elementor Pro

[Robin W]

ah, ok add this plugin which should fix it

Hello theme Elementor bbPress template fix

[mikeybayer]

This did the trick! Thank you. My site just suddenly came to a slow crawl, but I assume that’s coincidental and not related to the plugin.

[mikeybayer]

Robin — Just FYI, I had to delete your plugin because not only was it slowing down the site but it deactivated my Elementor templates – they stopped displaying altogether on all my posts and pages. So the plugin seems to help Elementor be compatible with bbpress search but hurts Elementor in other ways. Thanks very much for your efforts to help though. – Mike

[Robin W]

hmmm… that’s interesting, I fully believe you, but am struggling to see why it should either slow the site or cause other issues.

I would suggest you undo the content-search.php change you made above and see if that affects anything.

Beyond that, If that doesn’t work, also deactivate all plugins apart from bbpress and elementor plugin and my elementor fix and see if this sppeeds it up. if it does, re-enable one at a time to see which is causing the error.

If you cannot do this to your site (say because it is live) then use the ‘troubleshooting’ features of this plugin to let you test without affecting other users

Health Check & Troubleshooting

Then come back