[iamfantastikate]

I’ve followed bbPress’ development off and on since it first came out (aww, when it was a wee thing). It’s made many, many functional improvements since (good job, everyone!), but it’s lacking in the documentation department, and documentation is what has always made WordPress so great and accessible. For bbPress to really become a part of WordPress, even just as a plugin, the documentation needs to be better.

After so many years in development, I expected there to be more documentation when I gave bbPress a try this time around. Instead, there was a lot of teeth grinding and guesswork on my part, mainly because there’s so much conflicting information about how things work, not to mention all the old information that’s no longer relevant. But I did figure it out (screenshot of my work to prove it!).

I know bbPress 2.1 is in development and (may be) coming out soon with many new bells and whistles in regard to themes, but I feel for anyone struggling to get the current version to work. As such, I wrote some documentation. Which may or may not be placed in the wrong location of the Codex because there were no instructions for it, either, that I could see. (Sorry, admins!)

bbPress is still geared to the web-savvy at the best of times, I’d say, so I didn’t try to go into minute detail with all my instructions; rather, I tried to make it clear what should be done for the current version. I hope it helps someone!

[redrudolf]

Thank you for this awesome tutorial!

[BobHatcher]

As I found out the hard way, when you just dump all the bbpress theme files into your child theme – as you recommend in step 6 – you overwrite your style.css. So, my modification to your fine tutorial is to delete or rename the style.css in the bbpress directory before dumping them in. Same goes for screenshot.jpg because if you don’t rename it, you will get a screenshot of twentyten or twentyeleven when you go to the Themes area of your dashboard.

[iamfantastikate]

Thanks for your comments.

I’m assuming you had a backup copy of your stylesheet? Either way, it should only have header info in at the point of copying things over. I’ve made the tutorial clearer about that, though.

I never bother with screenshots for themes I’m making for myself, but I’m sure others do. I figured I’d leave that up to the user, but I’ve added a sentence about that.