I’m anxious to hear a response on this as well. I used bbpress for forums initially, but using that with BuddyPress it’s ugly as sin and there isn’t a forums directory page to display all the active forums (otherwise it did work). The interface for the forums inside BuddyPress looks very nice, but from sitewide forums, I couldn’t actually create any forums.
Options currently are:
a forum that works but is awful looking (bbpress)
a forum that looks nice but isn’t really working; at least ‘out of the box’ (BuddyPress)
Right now, BP is transitioning between an old version of bbPress (1.x) to the newest version (2.x), which is totally rewritten. The implementation of Sitewide Forums in BP 1.5 uses bbPress 2.x, while group forums use 1.x. (Complicated, I know ) The appearance and integration of sitewide forums will be much improved in BP 1.6, where we’ll have written the code necessary for bbPress 2.x to replace all forums in BP.
In the meantime, I suggest only using *either* Sitewide Forums or Group Forums. You could probably do some work to hack them together in a more seamless way, but much of the work will be done for you in the next major BP release.
Thanks for the update Boone. Is there a rough ETA on BP 1.6? The reason I ask is I’m working on a site that is due soon, and I’m really fumbling with forums right now.
Also- still can’t create forum topics in groups forums OR sitewide. Any suggestions?
Thanks again
I guess it’s back to using bbpress and attempting to style it up so it doesn’t look so bad?