@mikepratt, Burt nailed it on the head, but I’d like to add that I think many people are still stuck in the forum world, and haven’t peeked their heads out to see that social networking has evolved in the past 5 years or so. I know on lots of car or video game forums, it’s basically just a free for all chat fest, and trying to convert those minds into using BuddyPress or WordPress alone is too big of a change; I’ve tried it twice now with little success. Having a dedicated familiar looking forum but using BuddyPress to emphasize the social atmosphere helps those stubborn users transition a little easier and allow them to fallback on the features of a dedicated forum in the event it doesn’t work out.
@burt, I noticed on your Common Interest site that you have the forums separated between public and group. I would like to do something similar, and am curious as to how you did so. Also, is there an easy way to tap into the profile fields/user information from BuddyPress and display it as post author information in bbPress?
You would have better luck getting an answer to this one over at the bbPress forums. Lots of threads concerning this issue over there. You aren’t the only one with this problem.
https://bbpress.org/forums/
This is for sites that want to use bbPress as it was intended. As a forum. bbPress is designed to be that. The feature set of vertical software is more rich than horizontal software. bbPress does things now that bp doesn’t do and may never do.
I like having a forum interface to bbPress in bp. I’d like to see a blog interface also. I don’t expect the feature set to be the same.
It’s wonderful that bp has a forum interface since I think that forums are an extremely important part of social software. People who get together in groups like to talk. I think that the tools we use to communicate can constrain or enable that communication.
The purpose of bbGroups is to extend bp’s native strengths.
Burt – Congrats on what appears to be a successful plugin. Could you humor me? I don’t quite understand the use case for it. Is it for folks who want to leave the confines of the BP Group forums and interact via the bbPress door to the same forums? I don’t deny that someone would but I’m not sure why since they can do it right there in BP (at least on my site)
Hey John. I was just going to suggest on the other thread that we move any discussion to here. You’re way ahead of me.
Keep banging on it.
There are things that have been left out intentionally. Lack of time. Don’t know what to do with certain things. Certain areas in bp haven’t been fully developed yet.
So far this is working for exactly as advertised and intended. Major thumbs up and I’m quite surprised it isn’t a built in part of BP.
I’m gonna. Gotta do some things first.
Try this one. I just changed the fn names on the bbpress side to be unique and wrapped a couple of fns in if(function_exists()) that I know are mu fns.
http://ourcommoninterest.org/downloads/bp_group_forums_0.21.zip
When activating the oci_bb_groups_forums.php plugin, I receive this error…
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare oci_server_methods() (previously declared in [...]/wp-content/mu-plugins/oci_bp_group_forums.php:417) in [...]/discussions/my-plugins/oci_bb_group_forums.php on line 249
This comes from my using “deep integration” on the bbPress side, including wp-load.php to allow access to the WP/BP functions (despite being told not to do this, ha!)
Adding some if function does not exist checks might be a good measure…
Did this for:
oci_service_methods
oci_escape
oci_authenticate
oci_xmlrpc_query
trailingslashit
untrailingslashit
Also, I added this around the ixr inclusion:
if (defined(BACKPRESS_PATH)) {
require_once( BACKPRESS_PATH . '/class.ixr.php' );
}
Might not be correct, but it did get rid of the double inclusion for me.
After those changes I was able to get that file to include without problem. Gonna keep testing. 
Update: working on final packaging and documentation for BuddyPress Group Forums for bbPress. Still some features that need to be added but testing in other environments is more important. Should have it done by the end of the day.
I’m developing a theme for bbpress that is more bp centric but it’s not going to look like the bp themes. There’s gonna be lots of new themes being developed for bbpress soon.
I have hacked together a solution for this. I hope to release a bbPress plug-in in the coming week
I’ll post a link here when it’s done.
For what it’s worth…
http://delsolownersclub.com/
@hardcoded, the bbPress forum server for the Automattic sites sometimes gets a little caught up on itself, but your posts do eventually show up. I’ve also noticed sometimes that it’s just a browser cache issue, and refreshing the page will usually show your post.
It sure is!
I just want to make sure that A) no-one else is doing it already and 
that it’ll be used.
It doesn’t exist yet people. What an opportunity!
I’ve been googling for this without any luck.
If I would take a stab at creating a BuddyPress theme for bbPress, would that be interesting or just a waste of time?
My BBPress installation cannot find my salt cookies even when I plug them into the install from wp-config.
They do not appear in my WPMU admin options menu.
I always get this message at the end of install:
>>> WordPress “auth” cookie salt not set.
>>>>>> Could not fetch “auth” cookie salt from the WordPress options table.
>>>>>> You will need to manually define the “auth” cookie salt in your database.
>>> WordPress “logged in” cookie salt not set.
>>>>>> Could not fetch “logged in” cookie salt from the WordPress options table.
>>>>>> You will need to manually define the “logged in” cookie salt in your database.
Forum could not be created!
Nevertheless, I get an email saying that the install was successful. But when I go to the BBPress admin in the WPMU dashboard it doesn’t see the installation.
Right now I’m not sure how to handle the group deletion on the bbpress side. I can delete the forum if the group gets deleted ya. However, when I thought about it I decided to let the site admin/keymaster handle that now manually. The situation I thought of was a group admin gets bent out of shape, deletes the group and there goes a huge group asset if I just blindly kill the forum. So that action in bp is just being ignored now.
The only major problem I have now is that group join/leave in the group directories doesn’t work. Doesn’t even join/leave the group much less do what it’s supposed to in xmlrpc to talk to bbpress. It works in the member theme fine. Some sort of conflict in that context I have to track down.
Wow kudos for the in depth reply. I’m super excited to give this a shot, I’m actually waiting to go live until I see how this works.
I think it’s a great idea to keep things all synced up also. I made the mistake of adding a group forum in BuddyPress and deleting it in bbPress. Boy did that make things angry ha!
I’ve noticed even if I use what bbPressers call “deep integration” (including wp-load.php in bb-config.php) on the bbPress side, bbPress still seems to blast out the BuddyPress specific content. I’ve echoed the files and I know they are all getting included, they’re just not doing anything once bbPress gets a hold of it.
I believe Nicola is using gravatars for both his buddypress and his bbpress installations.
Yeah I agree that there should be a MU pass-through for the Buddypress plugins to work on bbpress. I don’t see why they wouldnt since everything is fully integrated, but for some reason they are not. This also, makes me wonder how Nicola gets avatars to show up on the bbpress side. I am having some issues with that as well! Any ideas? I would love to see the forum theme that Nicola is using and make my modifications off of that!
I have this plugin up and running. Here’s the way it works. You install a plugin on the bp and the bbpress side, import your existing groups and group users into bbpress. That creates forum and user meta data in bbpress that allows group forums to operate there as expected.
Part of the package is a live link using xmlrpc to do two things.
1. Keep the forum and user meta data updated for changes in bp. New groups, group status changes, users joining/leaving groups, user promotion/demotion/ban.
2. New topics and replies created in bbpress need to show up in the bp activity stream and trigger actions over there.
I’ve got the import done and the link from bp to bbpress in xmlrpc running. I’m working on the bbpress to bp link now. Should have the bbpress to bp link done by today or tomorrow.
Then I need to test it on my linux server and let interested others give it a whirl on their development servers. That’s where things stand.
you should edit the header.php of the default theme of bbpress, as i’ve done on buddypressdev.org/forums
