BuddyPress.org

Respect is EARNED. There is NO excuse for poorly written, sloppy, incomplete, often confusing, misleading instructions. While I’m new to Word Press, Buddy Press, bbPress I am a seasoned computer user, programmer, with over 30 years experience. If I get confused with the “instructions” I assure you others with much less experience will also.

One big gripe I have is those writing instructions for BuddyPress and bbPress make assumptions and throw out terms WITHOUT first defining them. That is the root of much of the confusion newbies to these plug-ins have resulting in much needless guessing, trial and error and time wasting.

I can say WordPress and it various plug-ins can be a nightmare to work with because of the above. Your comments actually confirm that.

Yes, I read the “instructions” and visited the shortcode page. Since shortcodes are typically “extras” one might add AFTER your site is basically working I glossed over the one that works.

My point here is since anyone installing bbPress or Buddy Press would logically want to make such additions a MENU CHOICE or what’s the point of having them that should be specifically explained in the instructions far more clearly that it is to avoid confusion.

What compounds the confusion is Buddy Press works very different than bbPress. The former automatically generates a listing of Groups by simply making a BLANK Groups page! That bbPress requires a shortcode to generate a list of forums isn’t explained anywhere in the main instructions and many like me will miss how to do it and spend countless hours hunting all over the web and asking for a solution. Again this points to sloppy incomplete instructions and yes, doing that does make me angry!

It would be illogical to assume anyone wishing to use bbPress forums would not make them a menu item. How to do that should be explained in the MAIN instructions not expecting users to wander off to various other pages and pick and choose some shortcode to see what happens. Even the correct shortcode [bbp-forum-index] is misleading in that “index” isn’t defined as to WHAT it will do. Again leaving end users to GUESS. Instructions that make users GUESS are incomplete and sloppy!

Please excuse this extra long post, its necessary and may be eye opening to the developers who should read EVERY WORD to see what needless torture they put people though. What follows is a step by step. If Einstein were still alive and tried to set up Buddy Press he too would be confused and royally pissed-off over the often missing, misleading or incomplete instructions and poor design choices. Keep in mind I actually have Buddy Press and bb Press BOTH up and running or it at least appears so. Even that is uncertain because if there is a way to tell the difference between a Buddy Press forum and a bb Press forum I sure can’t tell and it for sure isn’t obvious either in the appearance or how they are references from the Dashboard. Another serious blunder in my opinion.

Trying to figure out WHICH program you are actually in is PART OF THE PROBLEM.

1. I go to my Dashboard and see what looks like a clam shell icon in front of Forums. I click this and see a listing of the 7 forums I created so far. Is this Buddy Press forums or BB Press?

2. I scroll down the Dashboard left column looking for an entry for BB Press. There is none. That’s confusing since there is one for Buddy Press and people of course will think you should click there. I do realize for some poorly considered reason it got moved to Settings. Ok fine, I go to Setting looking for bbPress and guess what, THERE IS NO LISTING for BBpress under Settings aside for bbPress Moderation which is just extra options.

So logically I return to the Dashboard and go check under plug-ins to see if bbPress was actually activated. It was. So since nothing shows under bbPress under settings I click on settings under plug-ins and get to a page called Forums Settings. Oh goodie, it appears I’m getting somewhere.

3. I scroll down the above mentioned Forums page and set Forums Base to General Forums and the Forums slug to all-forums. Leaving everything else to the defaults.

Returning to the Dashboard and going to Settings again I click on Forums and get the same page I just mentioned. Again the instructions are very confusing to a newbie since both bbPress and Buddy Press can make Forums. Why don’t it say bbPress forums?

4. I return to my site, it appears to work EXCEPT for the original question I asked. All I want to do is create a page like I did for Buddy Press which lists all the GROUPS. What was simple and just happened automatically.

All I want to have is a similar page that lists all the bbpress discussion groups (some page) and then link that to the menu buttons. What should be child’s play, but it does not work. I tried both general forums and all-forums and tried countless others and all manner of combinations and all that happens is I get back a blank page. FRUSTRATING beyond description!

Oh on BP 1.7 bbPress 2.2.4 WP 3.5.1

This weeks question & answer: 

Showcase, promotion and custom content types

Question Summary: How to add PromotionBar and ShowCase feature to your custom post types?

Solution: Its super simple;

add_filter('firmasite_pre_get_posts_ekle', "firmasite_custom_cpt_add");
function firmasite_custom_cpt_add($array){ 
	$array[]='anothercct'; 
	return $array; 
}

This code will activate PromotionBar and ShowCase features for your custom post type 🙂

the buggy page if anyone wants to take a look is malaysianmedicineDOTcomSLASHforums

Thanks for your reply @Hugo. I did also post on the bbPress forum as you suggested, but unfortunately no reply. Are you able to help me please, even with a quick pointer? – as I am stuck on this one.

I just need to find out how to get the main bbPress topic id from a Buddypress group>forum>topic+replies page.

I need this for a function to show each topic’s WPSEO meta title and meta description for the appropriate Buddypress group>forum>topic+replies pages (rather than the current BuddyPress metadata). Once I get it working, I intend to share my function with the community, as quite a few people seem to be after this. So I hope you can help us all please.

bbPress BP forums for groups and 1.6.5 is the version

mercine said: I haven’t checked out the hack itself and I’m not going to

Thank you 🙂 no problem.

and regarding  Boone Gorges statment….?

Thanks mercime

I was really interested on what moebis posted there even for testing purposes but i could not find out where exactly to hack that code, You know?

For now I´ll stay with the default buddypress forum instead plus that very nice plugin https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-group-hierarchy/   and another one to attach some images on forum´s topics. i guess they´ll do trick 😉

<code>Multiple forums per BuddyPress Group is started in bbPress, but likely won’t be finished for several months.</code>

And that said let´s wait for the leadres.

Once more thank you

Ps. I´ve heard from Boone Gorges ( http://www.youtube.com/embed/PTNdMn8rGlg ) that native buddypress forums will not get updated anymore but i don´t think it  will be just cutted  off from bp 1.7.xx  and further. What you think?