[Jeroen de Bruijn]

So I have been appointed head website tinkerer for our MMORPG guild. As such, I wanted a good platform for our website, and of course came to WordPress.
One of the most important features of the site will be forums. Given what i read about buddypress / I think that would be an ideal solution:

Basically what i want is to create forums, where part of the forums are
– accessible to the general public
– a large group of forums for guild members
– a group of forums for moderators

– a few forums for Guild leaders. (these are people form a ‘group’ moderators)

General public
People who are not a member of my blog, or who are not logged in

Guild members
People who are member of my blog and are logged in

Moderators
People who are guild members and are also in a group [moderators]

Guild officers
People who are guild members and are also in a group [Guild officers]

A [guild officer] is always a [moderator]
A [moderator] is not always a [guild officer]

The confusion for me is how to set it up.
I am quite sure, i could do this with a forums for groups set up,
but a small survey among guild members is that they do expect to have one long list of forums. (similar to forum software of BBphp or SMF) with certain forums not visible depending on group membership. They are used to this method,

The idea of this page being like:
[General public]
– Anouncements
– rules
[member forums]
– Introductions
– marketplace
– helpdesk
– fun stuff
[moderator forums]
– guides
– discussions
[guild officer forums]
– guides
– discussions
– projects

I am not here to start arguments, or flame wares, just want to see if i can set it up with the software i prefer to use, or if i have to move on to another platform

I also am a bit confused about having to install the latest bbpress version additional to buddypress, or if that is not required/usefull.

I have been reading, searching about the topic, but i might have used the wrong keywords. so a point in the right direction might help already

[Roger Coathup]

Hi Jeroen,

we’ve built a lot of sites on BuddyPress – and forums are often a big issue for our clients.

Clients / users expect forums to behave like normal forums (as your users have already indicated as well). Unfortunately, the BuddyPress group forum approach just doesn’t work in this regard.

If forums are crucial to your site – then yes, install the bbPress plugin alongside BuddyPress, and work with the standalone forums it provides.

You’ll need to implement some logic to control accessibility / visibility to certain restricted forums – but that’s not difficult – you can either use the BuddyPress Groups to group your guild officers, and then use the BuddyPress API to test whether a member is in that group. Or, if you don’t require the other group functionality, you may be best to create a new user role with the standard WordPress API.

If you want to see a couple of examples of bbPress providing standalone forums on a BuddyPress site, you can check out our builds for http://worshipministry.com and http://enterprisenation.com

Hope that helps, Roger

[Jeroen de Bruijn]

Hello Rodger,

Thanks for your quick response
I have to read in on these items some more, but I think you hit the nail on the head

thanks again for pointing me into a direction

Jeroen