Hey, Everyone,

I’m used to forums and the structure of forums. I like the idea of a social networking site, but is there no way to have it organized, at least at the end-user’s (that is, the visitor’s) request, as a traditional forum, in traditional forum hierarchy?

Seems that, judging by what I can see here, BuddyPress is organized into groups, each of which maintains its own forums…is that right?

BTW, I’m a hold-out from the period between 1995-2005, roughly, so I don’t really get Facebook, Myspace, Redbook, Friendster, Twitter, whoever! Thus, my questions reflect my general ignorance with social networks and why they’re set up the way they are. I mean, I understand giving everyone their own page, blogs, “groups,” and whatnot…I don’t understand why all that can’t be organized into a traditional electronic bulletin board structure, which seems more understandable to me.

I mean, I ain’t even sure I’ll be able to find any replies, should any be posted! Took me a few minutes of navigating to find somewhere to post this post, unlike in a traditional forum where I’d just look for the “Introduce Yourself” sub-forum….

Yes, I know my questions probably make no sense! So thanks for listening….

[@modemlooper Moderator 13 years, 3 months ago]

Use beta BuddyPress 1.5 and the bbpress plugin. Go over to testbp.org and you can see the combo in action

[@karmatosed Moderator 13 years, 3 months ago]

My philosophy is everyone starts knowing nothing we all know varying things and should share to help each other. Whilst a lot of what I think you want to know would be helped if you can by installing BuddyPress on a a site somewhere and exploring or trying the test site (http://testbp.org/). Let me see if I can help a little.

Traditional forums would be what bbpress (https://bbpress.org/) would be your solution for. Now, in saying that BuddyPress uses bbpress for forums. So it’s a mutual use in sense of BuddyPress.

The way groups work are yes by having forums. The way I like to think of them are hang outs / clubhouses where there is a link between members and they can discuss. I may have an interest in dogs (the main site) but I may only want to talk about dog training or labradors (those would be groups). That’s a bit of a broad explanation but hopefully gets the notion across.

Now can you have traditional forums – yes with bbpress but groups is a more segemented talking.

Others may have their own breakdowns of it but to me this is what groups and forums are in simple terms.

Some more links to share with you though that may help it make a bit more sense:

https://buddypress.org/about/story/

And here is from the buddypress.org home page about groups:

“Powerful public, private or hidden groups allow your users to break the discussion down into specific topics. Extend groups with your own custom features using the group extension API.”

And about forums:

“Full powered discussion forums built directly into groups allow for more conventional in-depth conversations.”

[@tirekicker Member 13 years, 3 months ago]

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes the obvious answer would be “install it in a ‘sandbox’ and try it out for yourself” but isn’t that what this site is supposed to be, right here, that very sandbox, that very demonstration? And I’m saying it’s confusing to n00bz from Web 1.0! And I’m asking whether there’s some way of adjusting the views, ultimately, in an admin panel or something, to look differently for those of us interface-fascists stuck to our old reactionary ways!

I think I get the idea of groups, but I don’t see how that’s so special from what was available on traditional forums, with a hierarchy of headers and forums/sub-forums (fora?) thereunder…but at least in that old style, it was visually self-explanatory. Here, forgive me for being a dumb ol’ fogy (39 goin’ on 90 here), but I had to puzzle it out in my head!

[@tirekicker Member 13 years, 3 months ago]

Post Scriptum:

I also notice that replies are not “staggered” or whatever they’re called, placed visually underneath the comment it’s responding to…like I said: confusing!

[@anonymized-96400 Inactive 13 years, 3 months ago]

This site here is not a sandbox. It’s not meant to test things out. That would be http://testbp.org, as you can see from the theme, for example. testpb runs the default theme, while we have a more or less functional custom theme here

Install BuddyPress in a subdomain or, better locally on your home computer, and test out what it can do and what it can’t do. testbp is good in that you can see what you can do as an end user, but you won’t know what you can adjust as a site admin.