BuddyPress.org

Sorry for recommending Quickpress, it works only with WPMU. Try one of the other plugins I listed above.

If you want each user to have their own seperate blog, then yes, you’ll have to use WPMU or you can wait until WP 3.0 is released.

Use this guide to integrate an external install of bbPress with WordPress:
http://www.wpmods.com/integrate-wordpress-bbpress

Many BuddyPress developers use the WordPress Plugin Repository to host their BP-based plugins. Just make sure that you include the tag “buddypress” as one of the tags in your plugins header section.

Not sure if it’s been mentioned yet, but pagination at the bottom of the plugins page (https://buddypress.org/extend/plugins/) would be useful (right now it’s only at the top).

Let’s not stop there! From my laundry list off the top of my head (not bothering to use a UL because I don’t know if it’ll get stripped or not):

Link in the overall forums directory view to the last post in a thread (as Modemlooper suggests above)
Thread pagination links for each forum thread in the directory view
Username of the thread starter on the directory view
Pagination to get to older threads in the forums directory
Blockquote, pre or code tags, some indication of what HTML is allowed in forum posts
Different styling of a and a:visited elements in the forum directory view
A return of the ability to favorite threads to bookmark them for later and a place to easily survey and keep up with the threads we’ve started or commented in

for starters.

I want to add that the method above is really for creating plugins or multipaged slugs. Telling BP that a folder is a slug. So you can add a folder named whatever you want that slug to be and then put files in this folder.

Can we at least get blockquotes working in the forums? This is ridiculous. Changing it to italics above.

kses.php, as I recall.

wordpress will load page.php for every page you create so you cant really customize it..

Not necessarily.

Echoing modemlooper, you don’t need any of that code above. If you want Pages you create in WP to have different layouts, create a template file (https://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Creating_Your_Own_Page_Templates), upload it to the root of your theme, and when you add the new page in WP, just select the template you wish to use. Arbitrary PHP, HTML, stylesheets, whatever.

I’d like to second the points @gregfielding made. Besides that, I think overall it’s a pretty good design but might be somewhat confusing and overwhelming for newbies.

Integrate what exactly?

WP with external bbPress?

You don’t need any of that code above. You can easily create a page using WP page templates.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Pages

By the way, as an aside, I’ve been an active member of Metafilter, which I assume most of you have heard of (perhaps erroneously), closely watched it evolve for about 10 years now, and think of it as one of the best, smartest, most well-run semi-open communities on the web, and I believe a lot of lessons about how to keep things as simple and clear as possible (some say too simple, but I tend to disagree) while offering as much functionality as possible can be learned from the decisions Matt Haughey has made there.

It may be old-school, but looking only or even primarily to Facebook and Twitter and the like for inspiration can be a mistake, I think.

I asked a very similar question related to putting widgets in the sidebar with the Activity stream as the home page, rather than the blog as the home page. I got a very helpful answer from @pcwriter. You can read my question and the answer at this post: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/can-you-customize-the-activity-stream-page/

Not sure if that answers your question specfically, but maybe it will help.

Also, yes, I know ‘get back on your porch, grandpa — forums are so 1998.’

Fair enough — but that way of structuring conversation on the web is everywhere for a good reason. It works, and people intuitively understand it. You can’t force people into new interaction paradigms, you have to design interpenetrating ways of letting them interact, and let them choose for themselves the way they do it. As designers, I believe we must give users reasonable choices. We also have to respect the data — the kind of information a site presents informs the way it should be presented. Forum must follow function.

Yeah, I’m very much in agreement with Modemlooper on the sitewide Activity stream, here and in general. Focussing on it as a hub of activity is the wrong paradigm, because it moves too fast for anything but the smallest communities. One excellent solution is rich’s plugin that brings activity stream replies to forum posts inline to the post itself — I use that on the site I’m building now, to try and keep conversation from being fractured.

Different users use sites in different ways, of course, and the Activity stream is certainly one user story that shouldn’t be ignored. But, as I’ve said so many times before over the past almost-a-year, forums, in one sense or another, have a sense of permanency for users, a ‘virtual place’ they can return to, and I believe should be the anchor of a site like this and many others, where the ongoing stream of activity and making-friends for superfans and power users is less important than information being discoverable and discussion interactions being aggregated rather than just fading away. I am growing more disenchanted with the apparent lack of attention being paid to what I believe for many is essential for a successful community site — a featureful forum setup that is the steady beating heart of the swirl of activity.

Yes, I know the bbPress option is suboptimal as a solution, but it’s what we have to work with, and it can’t be ignored or passed off to bbpress.org, because we’re not running bbPress, we’re running an interface free, bbPress-plugin-incompatible fork of it, in essence if not reality, and I really do believe that more attention needs to be paid to the limitations of it as a component of BP and ways to make it work for community-building and user satisfaction.

Anyway, back to Activity. On true social network sites (whatever that means, exactly), it makes some sense that things are ephemeral, that interactions disappear beneath the fold, because, hey, it’s all about interacting with people, socially.

But the focus of this site (and most sites I might consider building with BP) is not just making friends and having a grand old social time. It’s sharing information, asking questions, discussing solutions, offering and asking for assistance, and it’s important that the interface those interactions be structured discoverable for people who are going to have the same questions in future as BP adoption grows, and the toolset for creating them be rich, both from the administration and user-facing perspectives.

How many times do we see the same questions being asked, basic or otherwise? To answer my own question, a lot. That’s just human nature in part, certainly, but it’s also, I think, because the tools we have for using these forums are vestigial, and people just don’t have the information they need at their fingertips. User confusion and frustration will kill a community faster than goatse images. We’re all so used to using this app that I think we lose sight of just how daunting it is for new users. The site I’m building for an existing community on a different platform has taught me that, very quickly.

Not a comprehensive list, but just stuff that comes immediately to mind: things like the lack of a link in the overall forums directory view to the last post in a thread, thread pagination links, or the username of the thread starter, like the inability suddenly to post code, like the lack of pagination to get to older threads in the forums directory (which leads to a ‘uh, now where do I go to see older threads’ reaction, in me, at least, a question to which I still don’t know an answer that doesn’t involve an awful lot of clicks and blind alleys), like the fact that a and a:visited elements are styled the same, like the eyestrainy new design, like conversation being fractured between activity stream and forum posts, like the loss of the ability to favorite threads to bookmark them for later and a place to easily survey and keep up with the threads we’ve started or commented in, well, it’s death by a thousand cuts at the moment.

Don’t take this as just moaning, though. I don’t mean to insult anyone, and I know how much my feelings are hurt when my own users level harsh criticism of my design decisions. I love BP, I think @apeatling and everyone else involved in building and supporting BP, ‘officially’ or not, are doing a great job, and I see nothing but further successes. But I think BP itself, as it stands, without thinking a little bit (OK, a lot) more about how actual users use it, is a poor match for this site, so far. It wasn’t that great in the old design, but it’s orders of magnitudes more confusing and difficult to use now, even for someone like me who’s been nipples-deep in BP for many months.

OK, I’ve typed enough. I’m going back to work on my Stylish Firefox extension stylesheet for this site so that the low-contrast doesn’t give me headaches any more.

@michael

Great site! I’m glad the template’s working for you. I would however recommend a slight mod to the css of http://citizensofinfluence.com/forums/

The “Unsubscribe” buttons overlap into the right sidebar. To correct, add this to your theme’s custom.css file:

table.forum td.td-poster, table.forum td.td-group {
min-width:100px;
}

You’ll find the original in bp-default (default.css) on line 940 where the column width is set to a minimum of 130px.

I’ve said this before. The site wide activity stream is almost useless. Too much happens to really follow it properly. I’ve pretty much removed it from my BP sites and focus on profiles with forum activity.

Peter I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there are 3 Core Developers working on BuddyPress and a huge bunch of other developers spending time on improving it.. This thread is about the redesign so why you need to bring up all this b.s is beyond my ability to comprehend.

About the redesign:

I’m trying my best to get used to it, I feel kinda lost.. It feels “wrong” to me, and I can’t put my finger on it.. While the old site/forum was simple, it gave me a quick overview of what happened when I was gone, and now I’m constantly getting the feeling that I’m missing something.. Like there’s stuff happening elsewhere (in the Activity stream etc) which I’m missing..

My suggestion would be use the power of the activity stream, and the group forums and make a layout were you split them in half.. The activity stream on the left, and the recent forum topics on the right.. this way you’ll get an complete overview of what happening from the “Community” section..