Integrating WordPress/bbPress theme

[williamsba]

I like bbPress, although I know it has a long way to go to be a solid forum package, but when will they offer an easy way to "embed" a bbPress forum into a WordPress theme? After researching this, trying for myself, and looking for any hacks/plugins to make this easier I've determined this process sucks at the moment.

Unless I missed something obvious, has anyone had any experience with this?

[brandingdavid]

Simple way:
Include a wordpress file (the file name escapes me right now) and then just edit the bbpress theme in such a way that the header and footer are mostly your original WP theme files. I've seen this done in less than 8 hours of work.

I do agree though that some way of almost embedding it into a theme would be immensely useful.

[Ryan]

I like bbPress, although I know it has a long way to go to be a solid forum package

It is an awesome package if you want to totally redesign everything in your forum. Nothing else comes close IMO. Havind said that, I am too lazy (and not good enough at programming) to do some things so actually use an SMF install instead. On my support forum, I wanted a paid subscription service which isn't easily doable with bbPress, plus it doesn't handle guest posting very well.

(the file name escapes me right now

wp-blog-header.php I think is the file you are thinking of David.



I'm actually in the process of preparing a system for integrating WordPress themes into bbPress easily right now. You can see a preview of the Revolution Generated theme integrated with bbPress here:
http://pixopoint.com/bbpress-demonst...erated_bbpress
Note: the links in the forum above don't work - I'm having issues integrating some other software with bbPress at the moment so the preview is just a mockup of what it will look like.

[brandingdavid]

Thank you... that is the file I was thinking of.

Also, bbPress has a number of great plugins, most of which are being developed by _ck_. And! Version 1.0 will be pretty decent. Recently, I had my eyes opened with regards to bbPress and I will probably go ahead and use it in future projects.

[Ryan]

Yeah, I've been using the latest alpha version too. I'm not sure how stable it is, but if I was launching a live site using it then I'd probably be running that one despite it not even being in beta yet. The improvements to the way it integrates with WordPress are quite huge.

If it wasn't for _CK_ I don't think bbPress would be looking as promising as it is. He is definitely the most prolific bbPress plugin developer out there.

[williamsba]

Simple way:
Include a wordpress file (the file name escapes me right now) and then just edit the bbpress theme in such a way that the header and footer are mostly your original WP theme files. I've seen this done in less than 8 hours of work.

I actually started this process, but it felt like such a nasty hack that I had to undo it. I need something cleaner....there should be a plugin to handle this function

[conorp]

I know this is off topic but I found this site that a few nice bbpress themes on it:

http://www.mybbpress.com/themes

[williamsba]

Jeff should make a sticky post where bbPress specific theme repositories can listed/found

Actually all sections could use that WordPress, WPMU, BuddyPress, and bbPress

[Ryan]

I actually started this process, but it felt like such a nasty hack that I had to undo it. I need something cleaner....there should be a plugin to handle this function

Nasty hack? It integrates everything (nearly) perfectly and just requires adding an extra line to your bb-config.php file. Making a plugin for it is kinda pointless IMO. You already need to edit your bb-config.php file to setup the database, so adding an extra line for WordPress makes sense to me.

[williamsba]

Maybe I was doing it wrong after all, because it was extremely nasty/sloppy the way I was doing it. I'll have to dig up the steps I was following and let you review them to see if I'm doing it right