BuddyPress.org

depends on how you have it setup – deep integration is needed to pull in buddypress adminbar into bbpress.

technically it is hooked on

add_action( 'wp_footer', 'bp_core_admin_bar', 8 );

I’d be curious to hear more about what people miss about the bbPress admin panel. If it’s about activating plugins, I’m afraid that access to bb-admin.php won’t do any good. If the plugin is compatible with BP, then you should be able to put it in the WP plugin dir and activate it. But chances are good that it won’t be, as BP and bbPress are very different at the level of the template. bbPress plugins, at least the ones that have big surface effects, need to be rewritten to some extent to be compatible.

If the purpose is group-independent forums, then I think that a far, far better solution is to rig up a way to have some groups “unlisted”, so that their forums, while still attached to groups, would seem group-free. Not entirely trivial, but easy enough, and far, far less overhead than an entirely separate installation of bbPress that has to be separately themed, etc.

Or is there something else about the bbPress admin panel I’m forgetting? I suppose it would be kinda nice to have a place to see all topics at a glance from the admin panel.

From your plugin page:

Future Consideration:

* Report Post to Mod (use notification system to group mods)

* Support Forums (run nongroup forums)

* Best Answer or bb-reputation (Karma)

* bbPress Favorites functionality (renamed due to conflict of activity stream?)

Report Post w/notifications to group mods: That is excellent, and exactly what I had in mind here. Would there be some “admin” screen for reported posts, or would the notification just link you to the reported post?

1) Avatars – users can upload their own avatar. Please check out testbp.org for a demo of BP.

2) Use the BP Template Pack plugin – https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/

Be sure to go through all the steps in the plugin.

3) Go to testbp.org and try the group forums yourself. If you want a traditional forum script, use bbPress, vBulletin, phpBB, etc. BP is not a forum script – it’s social networking in a box!

I do not know how OpenSSO flies with BP. I looked and sorry, my memory and reference are slightly outdated; “OpenSSO” the project has become OpenAM and lives on, here as of last month, per Oracle swallowing Sun, then spitting out OpenSSO the project but keeping OpenSSO the name (classic).

I have had and have seen BP running with LDAP and with SSO between BP and MediaWiki. Here obviously we have BP and “external” bbPress with SSO even if it does still have the “Help I can’t post! the first time” issue. I have not personally used a plugin to this effect, but @boonebgorges or someone else may have wrapped up the like.

As for “BP Federation” I suggest it be more than BP – BP, rather BP – WP. WP sites with no interest in running their own BP could affiliate, conjugate, federate with an umbrella BP.

True, a system running BP after WP 3 will be able to host sites but each will necessarily be limited in some regards v. independent WP sites, just as one is now limited by being a blog site within a MU. With BP Federation, my thought is WP sites could have their cake — being independent — and eat it, too — affiliate with a parent BP — without needing to run BP themselves. Is that like having cake, eating it, too, AND sharing some with a friend? OK now I want cake. BG

Ensure your WP install is set to use the same timezone as your server. Test with a new message, not an old one, because in some areas the timestamps are cached and so won’t reflect any changes to the timezone (i.e. the Activity Stream is an easy example). If you still find an inconsistency, please report this as a bug on https://trac.buddypress.org/

There is a long way to go, but now that bbPress is tightly integrated in BP, forum support is emerging. Etiviti (rich!)’s new “Forum Extras” plugin that is a big leap toward bringing classic bbPress plugins into the BP environment, and it’s getting better every day. Forum attachments is another great plugin that brings a classic forum feature into the BP environment.

There are some core limitations of bbPress that will keep it from being as “powerful” as PHPBB, such as the ability to merge threads, but whether those features are critical or even desirable is open to debate. (Moderators love that feature but I am not sure users do.)

I hope it’s not true that forums are “minimized on purpose” around these parts, because what you have built is a perfect fit with forums. Forums are the heritage of web-based “social networking”, and there are a lot of important social interactions that still lend themselves quite well to the forum structure (such as this thread you are reading right now, for example).

Like that hybrid commercial on TV right now: Forums were social before Facebook even existed or YouTube uploaded its first video.

Nope, you’re on a BuddyPress powered site, but the forums that are integrated into BuddyPress are powered by BBPress.

Agree with Andrea_r. Note that the oneclick install forum doesn’t have as much community support as far as plugins go as the standalone bbpress does.

At the end for forums I think nobody beats phpbb. So whatever your focus is as a site/communicty/group go with the best extensible available solution. If forums is your core look at forum software that gives you what you need. I would hold back for investing in a swissarmyknife, but fail at the one thing that is important for your audience.

If you want forums, then BuddyPress is not the best tool. Try bbpress, that’s the forum for wordpress.

You’ll have to dig pretty deep into the bbPress code to make this work right. bp_forums_tag_heat_map uses bb_tag_heat_map to create the cloud, and it doesn’t take order or order_by as an argument. bb_tag_heat_map then goes to bb_get_tag_heat_map. If you were going to make the reordering happen (without a lot of funny business) it might best happen at the level of bb_tag_heat_map (or a custom version of that function). The list of tags is created like this (see buddypress/bp-forums/bbpress/bb-includes/functions.bb-template.php):

$tags = bb_get_top_tags( array( 'number' => $limit ) );

which returns an array. You could then try using usort to sort by $tags[‘count’] before sending $tags to bb_get_tag_heat_map().

“I really do like WordPress/Buddypress, I am just unable to structure the forums in buddypress in a true forum layout.”

If you’re just looking for a forum, then look at bbpress or any other forum package. BuddyPress has its focus on the social networking aspects. the forums area are minimized on purpose.

It sounds like you want a just a forum, not BuddyPress.

@nuprn1, what did you modify? I noticed that posts in bbpress don’t show up on the activity notifications, and the public/private/hidden stuff doesn’t seem to work either…

I can’t remember but i had to rewrite a bunch of it – and also hack the bbPress core to play nice with the GMT buddypress timestamps. Then throw in that bpGroups uses xmlrpc – so personally i’m moving to open up bbpress within buddypress instead of running an external bbpress install (with all the hidden/private forums)

OK, getting somewhere now:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function bp_wire_setup_globals() in /home/mysite/public_html/wpmu/wp-content/mu-plugins/oci_bp_group_forums.php on line 618

so the bbpress and Buddypress plugins are making contact but they are using (at least one) obsolete function. What is the replacement for bp_wire_setup_globals()?

That was part of BP before version 1.1