[Wendell]

I am considering a move to bbpress but am very concerned about keeping the general functionality of my current forum at http://surveyorconnect.com. It uses a threaded, hierarchal tree-style forum software and my users love it. A little backstory: an industry magazine used to have a similar forum, then switched to a newer format and nobody liked it — so I started a new forum using MyLittleForum (http://mylittleforum.net) and told a few surveyors about it and in short order, it was very busy and respected in the surveying community. Many of the users are “old school” and so they like this format. But I also want to attract a younger crowd, who I assume would prefer a more modern format.

What I’m really hoping for here is that bbpress would allow me to provide BOTH formats on a user-by-user basis, so they can select which format they’d prefer. Also, one of the features they like about the current site is the little bubble next to the date in the topics list that gives a preview of the latest post within that topic. If we lose that feature, I won’t be heart-broken, but it would be nice to have something like that in bbpress, if possible.

There is so much I could do with my forum that MLF won’t allow me to do. Probably the biggest thing is the social aspects — allowing people to “like” and share posts, etc.

I’d love your thoughts, opinions and references to anything that might help me make the decision to move to bbpress. Thanks!

[Stephen Edgar]

At a quick glance I’m quite sure bbPress could do everything that you mention above, just not out of the box will it do those things.

You would need to make these customizations yourself or hire a programmer to do them for you.

The ‘threaded “hierarchal tree-style” would just be a matter of making some custom templates and would be quite quick. To setup the different theme for different users I think there are a few WordPress plugins that let your users choose what theme they want to use, so have two themes, one with the default bbPress theme (with or without customizations, and the other theme with your customized “hierarchal tree-style” templates.

There are some docs on getting started with custom templates https://codex.bbpress.org/theme-compatibility/