[adammann33]

Hi all,

First off, I’d like to say wow, this stuff is awesome! Thank you for the effort that has gone into it.

I’d also like to pat myself on the back for having done two successful install/integrations of bbp and wp by following the integration screencast. Both have worked very well — I did have to use the fix admin login plugin on one, but it has worked since. The trick for a non-coder like me is to have the screencast in a separate window and pause it at every step.

For the site in my profile, http://www.herbalremedyforum.com , I’m using the tarski theme on the wordpress side, and the matching geneologies theme on the bbpress side. The two look fantastic together!

So my question is this: what’s the most effective way for me to get the knowledge/skills I need to pimp out my bbpress site like I did with my wp site as a non-coder? I’m not lazy — it just seems like I’m missing some basic information like how to get link into the bp sidebar with a widget as in wp.

As a bottom line, is there a suite of plug ins that gives the an approximation of the intuitive interface of the WP admin area? Or do I (gulp) need to go back to school and get a computer science degree? Somewhere in between? It seems like given the hand holding from the screencast that there must be other handholding that I’m not finding for the other basic stuff.

So two of the basic hand holdy questions: how do I put a link from my forum back to my wp blog? And how do a put an image in the header of the forum to match that of the wp blog?

[_ck_]

bbPress doesn’t yet have the ease of use that WordPress has

but it can be customized in pretty much the same way.

The problem is bbPress is much younger than WordPress so there is virtually no documentation and it’s also evolving so any changes you make today may have to be updated somewhat in a few months.

The best bet is to study existing plugins and themes however if you are not a coder that may be problematic.

You got this far though, I dare say you probably have the required determination to get it done.

[chrishajer]

To answer your last two questions: you need to edit the header.php file in your template folder.

[adammann33]

Thanks for the fast replies!

Could you guys point me to a kind of Editing “PHP Stuff For Dummies” — I’m embarrassed to say that I really don’t even know what all that code is in those files — what language it is and all that. I mean I’ve been a pretty savvy user of all manner of software for years but never gotten under the hood. But I’m willing to attack that steep learning curve because I dig it! Where do I start?

[_ck_]

Any template editing guide for WordPress should still be helpful for bbPress.

The header and footer parts are somewhat similar, just some slightly different names inside.

You are also going to need to change that link on your WordPress side for the forums to the proper link but that might be tricky since it’s not an internal wordpress page.

[adammann33]

So . . . I just got on amazon and bought three books on php and mysql. Hopefully soon I’ll be one of the cool kids! Thanks for the help!

[_ck_]

Yikes. Well I guess that is one way. Books are great but nothing beats hands-on.

Funny thing is I’ve never read a book about PHP or MySQL

I learned through reading other people’s code and trial and error and reading php.net and mysql.com

Not knowing how to make a link from one page to another though is a more fundamental problem, it means you don’t know HTML either?

A link to your front page looks like this:

<a href="http://herbalremedyforum.com/">main site</a>

However in your case, your theme already has a section for a nice menu at the top.

It looks like the theme author was clever enough to put in a way to modify it.

Save this as a file called _my-custom-menu.php

http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?dl=f4d77734c

and upload it into the bbpress my-plugins directory. If you don’t have such a directory, make one (just like the bb-plugins that’s already there)

Alternately you could edit functions.php in your genealogias theme folder around line 102

function gs_navigation_menu() {

$links = array();

$links[] = sprintf('<a href="%s">%s</a>', bb_get_option('uri'), __('Front Page', 'genealogies'));

$links[] = sprintf('<a href="%s">%s</a>', bb_get_tag_page_link(), __('Tags'));

$links[]='<a href="http://herbalremedyforum.com/">main site</a>';

printf('<ul class="primary xoxo"><li>%s</li></ul>', implode('</li><li>', apply_filters('gs_navigation_menu', $links)));

}

[adammann33]

Thanks CK! Yeah — I’ve not done any html either, but I’m less intimidated about getting in there and cut and pasting and what not, which I’ve done as it is more intuitive. Heh, so maybe I need an html for dummies too! I don’t want to be one of those guys who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty! So thanks for the tips — I’ll check out those sites you referenced.

[chrishajer]

25 Resources to Get You Started with PHP from Scratch:

http://nettuts.com/articles/web-roundups/25-resources-to-get-you-started-with-php-from-scratch/