Nicola, I don’t need help with that part. Got that figured out. 
See, I don’t want to use the group forums at all. I just want a general forum. So I installed it at /forums and I integrated it. My question was if css styling/adding page navigation was my best bet for making it “look” integrated. I think the answer is “yes”.
Burt, I hear ya. I need a forum to take over for a currently vibrant and active Invision Power Board installation. I and the other admins are so used to all the features, privacy, levels of privacy, user moderation, terms of service, etc. that bbPress seems lacking. Simple:press delivers on some of those things, but I’m not happy with the cluttered, busy look of it.
But, this decision does not just come down to styling. I think I’ve managed to make my forums (bbPress) look just like my main site (though could use the BuddyBar there 
). It is more the features that I need right now.
I am leaning toward going with bbPress and working on/waiting for those features. But I’m not sure.
Thanks for the input.
Let me ask you another question? When I log in on my main site, then go to my forums, it does not show me as logged in. However, if I do a Ctrl-F5 complete refresh, then I am logged in. So is this a cache issue? Do you know how I can fix it?
Here is the plugin to moderate new blogs: http://wpmudev.org/project/Moderate-New-Blogs
But I don’t believe there is one to moderate new users. There is a hack for WPMU that does not work for BP because BP overrides WPMUs registration/activation process. I am working on trying to do the hack to BP… but it is not working so far.
I would like to have a private network also. I don’t want the main site to be private, but I want all the members, groups (if I use them), forums, wire activity, etc. to be private.
Regarding the blog privacy, if you set the user blogs to anything but option #1 (google-able), then the blogs don’t show up in BP “blogs” list. I think there needs to be something in the middle here — ie. no search engines can find the blogs, yet members can view the blog lists and browse the blogs.
This is exactly what I’m trying to do – create a private, members-only site that could be either invite-only or have the registrants moderated by the admin. I would think this scenario would be pretty common with many groups – companies, orgs etc.
I’ve spent the past day and a half combing this forum and others looking for the solution. FYI, I’m not a PHP programmer, but I can copy and paste code when necessary. The closest I’ve gotten is with 2 methods:
– the plugin that Trent posted that PW-protects the member pages. It does allow new registrations but it doesn’t protect the home page or the groups.
– the More-Privacy-Options plugin mentioned above, with the “Site can be viewed by registered users only..” option turned on. The problem I’m having with this one is there’s nowhere for new people to apply/register. So if you’re a non-member and you go to any page (including the registration page) you get the login screen, which doesn’t have a Register link. I’m guessing there must be a workaround for this, but haven’t been able to find it yet.
Which brings me to another problem that I’m having, which is how to invite non-members into the site. I’ve got the “Invite Friends” plugin installed and it seems to work ok, but it’s only for the administrator, which is ok for now, but eventually it would be good to be able to allow site members to invite new people in. I see this as an option in the settings, and a link in the Friends sidebar.
Using a common example, Facebook is pretty much doing all of this now. So non-members arrive at the base URL to a landing page with an intro message, where they can register for membership. Plus existing members can invite (via a link in the friends area) non-members to join up.
Next time contact me on BPDEV
You’ve to do another bbpress installation (change directory name sure! like http://buddypressdev.org /bp-groups/ for integrated bp-groups and /forums/ for the main forums).
Intregrate this one with wordpress and you’ve done
Nicola
Wardeh, I’ve looked at bbpress, simple:press and phpbb3. I installed, configured and toyed with all of them. IMHO bbpress is the best of the lot. It has user integration with mu, it’s fairly easy to learn and skin and it is going to be more and more tightly integrated with mu.
simple:press is just that, simple. If all you want is a quick forum component that integrates tightly with mu, it’s great. I just don’t see it going anywhere. My forums are extremely important to my site. I’m going to spend a lot of time and effort configuring and extending that component. My users are going to get used to whatever forum I hook up. I’d like the software that I’m working with to be around next year and have some kind of future.
phpbb3 is very powerful. It’s the top of the line when it comes to configuration options and sheer volume of features. If phpbb3 don’t got it, it doesn’t exist as an option or feature anywhere. It is possible to integrate with mu. I had it running that way. It’s main drawback is that it has so many options and features that it’s confusing for the end user. It’s daunting to visit a phpbb3 forum and see all the little buttons, options, links, notifications, doodads, geegaws and flashy things. I get confused, lost and frustrated myself on those. My experience has been that normal people who aren’t whiz bang computer geeks are frightened and confused by it.
bbpress also has the concept of plugins to extend it’s feature set and change it’s behavior. If I want to add or change a feature in phpbb3 then I have to modify the source code to get it.
@burtadsit i re installed it all again and it came alive its so cruciall to get it all right and as i have a slow conection here in kenya its a bit slow to get things updated..
can i ask for your attention on https://buddypress.org/forums/forum.php?id=3 some feedback would be ace..
excellent work danf & burtadsit! And thank you burtadsit for backing up danf … so much to learn so little time. That’s what makes forums incredibly helpful.
So the conflict was with the wordpress google calendar plug-in that was loading an older jquery file. I removed that reference and all is working beautifully.
Thank you all for your guidance!
Burt, this is the first time you yelled at me.
At least I know I’m doing the only option available to me at this point.
But… I was looking at Simple:Press the other day. http://simplepressforum.com/ It loads in a WP page and has more permissions/admin capabilities. Because it works as a WP plugin, the BuddyBar is in use there. In addition, because it is a plugin, you retain your regular sidebar/theme without having to do any tweaks — no making a separate forum installation “look” like it is the same.
I don’t know, looks pretty good. I set it up and everything and it worked fine in WPMU. Then I went back to bbPress. Was that stupid? The reason being that I’m worried that BP will support a general forum with bbPress one day and I want to stay in the loop if so, not wander off on another trail.
Any thoughts?
If you come up with anything, let me know, please?
Hey, the ‘buddybar’ is a great name. It stuck with me after I first heard/read you using it.
lol. This ‘buddybar’ thing I started is catching on. With all the right people it seems. I’m never gonna live this one down.
The buddybar(tm) relies on lots of mu specific stuff. It gets generated on each page load in mu. We ain’t in mu no more when we get to bbpress. I’ve been thinking about this issue also. A quick think tells me I might pass a global var from mu to bbpress that holds all the menu items that are useful to me over at bbpress. Then create a bbpress menu bar that builds a menu from that global. Same look, same items just not dynamicly built for each page load. Just gens it from the global each bbpress page load.
Just a quick think.
PHP var space is PHP var space. bbpress is just another hunk of code in PHP var space. Gotta go do some research on this php session stuff.
Wardeh! I keep yelling your name don’t I? Not sure why. Must be because you are far away. My girlfriend thinks that the farther away she is, the louder she has to be on the phone. Perhaps it’s related to that.
The bbpress theme integration issue is one we all face. I have to do it too. I just haven’t had the time yet. I agree that the group forums aren’t the easiest place to get to if I wanna talk or listen to what is going on there in my groups. I view the group forums at the moment to be a convenience.
A convenience to me in that I don’t have to create a forum for each group that wants one. Or forget to do that. Or don’t get around to doing that in a timely fashion.
The forums part is pretty neat, but it is really SIMPLE right now anyways. Andy just about didn’t add it to the beta 1.0 download. After 1.0 is released, there will likely be changes to the forums side anyways, so if you are having trouble configuring it now, it should get easier in the future!
Are both ImageMagick and GD2 both installed on your servers? The gurus over at the mu forums say that both have to be installed.
Hi Trent,
I finally gave up on cookie integration and went with just the wordpress integration. I got farther along in that I can post topics now with no errors, but adding a reply gives the dreaded red “There was an error posting that reply.” Looking over your last post gave me pause though. Are you saying to install only wpmu and bbpress, get them working, then install buddypress? Maybe I’m just tired, but the instructions from bp-forums/installation-readme.txt dont’ seen to follow that route. Makes sense though. I keep saying I’ve attempted this for the last time and moving on, but I find myself pulled back in once more with a faint glimmer of hope. I hope this isn’t the definition of insanity (always expecting different results).
Thanks for all your time in helping us.
Thanks David. I thought it might be useful to let people know that the bp core and all the lovely components can be accessed from any theme, any time. It ain’t rocket science, it’s programming.
I’m not too familiar with pastie. I’ve just used it a couple of times. It’s browsable? I just though it was a net wide scratch pad.
Nicola! I posted the same stuff over at buddypressdev.org too.
I’m working on Widgets too, on bpdev..
(i think we’ve to discuss in burtadsit’s topic on bpdev but here it’s the same)
As soon as possible i will write a post to how to customize and create own widgets
Burt,
These are great. And yes, these would be great long term if they were template tags or something similar. That way we can easily incorporate them into well-built components. But excellent job.
You may want to think about commenting the code in the pastie site itself, since some may stumble upon it in a manner OTHER than this forum post. Just a suggestion. 
David
UPDATED, i wrote an example plugin that works without adding files in member-theme
You can find a small post here http://buddypressdev.org/forums/topic.php?id=7
That explain a bit about this example extending component that i called bpdev-example
I forgot, here you can download bpdev-example : http://buddypressdev.org/plugins/bpdev-example
This sounds like an mu problem zanzoon. bp doesn’t have much to do with the backend of mu. Have you searched the mu forums? https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/
Have you googled for that error msg with ‘wordpress’ as one of the keys?
Looks like you are trying to modify a setting in the options page of mu and it doesn’t like what you are doing. I can’t tell you why from the info you’ve given.
Trent, where can I find this: –> WPMU 2.7 SVN
Hey stop by and check out our conservative version of BuddyPress! http://theodoremedia.com
Thanks, we are loving Buddy Press!
Trent, thank you.
I’ll try to do everything from scratch.
The “my-plugins” folder is actually based off the root of your forum install. If it is /forums/ then you would have /forums/my-plugins/ for the folder.
The real trouble with getting the forums side working is that it makes the assumption that you have WPMU and bbPress installed 100% and integrated properly even before you start trying to get the buddypress side going. Always make sure the logins are integrated and working right before you continue on.
Biegun also has a point as well. Buddypress accesses bbPress through publically accessible xmlrpc.php and if you put .htaccess in there for password protection, it will break as well since it won’t be able to access the installation.
slaFFik I would just suggest that if you reinstall WPMU 2.7, you also restart on bbPress 1.0 alpha 4 from scratch as well and then integrate the installs off the installation of bbPress and just go through all the steps again without having a bit more information.
