Hello. I’m running a community site running WP + BP and the BP group forums are not doing exactly what we’d like from a forum software. We used a punBB forum software previously and we’d like to keep the forum portion of the community site relatively similar; a focused forum area with forum areas with subcategories. I know there’s a development to make bbPress into a plug-in for WP, but I’m not whether we should/want to wait for that or if there’s already a good solution available.

Anyways, let me list what we ideally want from our forum:

– forum users derived from WP + BP user database so there is only one login required both to the site and forum
– possibility to control forum permissions based on BP groups and on single user basis
– forums with subcategories

That’s really the ‘must have’ part. Stuff like easy-ish access to forums CSS and other customization and forum features are bonus stuff. If you have ideas or pointers to what I should look for please advice!

[@boonebgorges Keymaster 14 years, 2 months ago]

I don’t know of anyone who has integrated punBB and BP. Here’s a plugin to share logins between the two systems: http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/punbb-and-wordpress-integration-plugin/. The group-level management stuff would probably have to be custom coded.

I’m not aware of anyone who has integrated a different forum software into BP that will meet your list of criteria, though maybe someone else in this forum has.

[@dralamir Member 14 years, 2 months ago]

Oh I didn’t necessarily mean we should use our original forum integrated into the new community site. I didn’t look into the link yet, but I’d imagine having existing users on both places (old forum and new community site) would conflict, no?

Thanks for the response.

[@boonebgorges Keymaster 14 years, 2 months ago]

Having existing users on the forum definitely makes it more complicated. But in the end, any integration plugin is going to have a username/user_id cross-reference, so you’d just have to write a script that does the initial setup with your existing users.

Your other option is to try to modify BP’s internal bbPress to do what you want it to do. The biggest hangup will be subcategories, which you might be able to fake with something like forum tags. But this path might be easier, given that you wouldn’t have to deal with cross-platform issues.

[@dralamir Member 14 years, 2 months ago]

I definitely don’t want to get into the whole integration of punBB and WP + BP, that’s for sure!

[@dralamir Member 14 years, 2 months ago]

Oh, perhaps I should have done this for the first post, but seeing as @johnjamesjacoby is working on the bbPress plug-in perhaps he can answer whether it’ll be something I’m looking for.