[Erlend]

I’d like to see the current implementation of Group Forums be deprecated out of core and put into a legacy plugin. As it stands, the Group Forums feature is error prone and inflexible.

Problems:

– Creates a ton of sub-forums, cluttering the forum index with ~5 post sub-forums.
– Causes URL inconsistency (some links point to links like /forum/myboard, others point to /groups/otherboard/forums)
– Unclear what functionality belongs to which component, bbPress or BuddyPress.
– The nature of the integration is not user- nor future-friendly because the basic logic of “what connects where” is not clear, it’s just some magic settings box.
– Group Forum activity is contained within a single category

I’ve made similar suggestions before, but haven’t started a self-contained discussion about it. I think the way wordpress.org handles its embedded forums is a much more elegant solution. And it is entirely possible with bbPress+BuddyPress as well.

Here’s a basic mockup:

View post on imgur.com

View post on imgur.com

http://jmonkey.erlendheggen.net/forums/topic-tag/group-tag/

When accessing the forum via a group, you’d see what you usually see today; a forum within the group view. But if you enter a topic, you’d be transferred to the forum, just like wp.org does it. But to maintain context, there’d be a context-sensitive group widget to remind you which Group this topic is associated with.

How it would work:
1) During group set-up, instead of creating a new forum, all you’d do is select a tag to display.
2) Whenever you post via this group, your selected tag will be automatically added to the topic.

Solutions:

– No new sub-forum per new group, just a new (or existing) tag.
– No URL leaping.
– bbPress serves up the shortcode, that’s it. The rest is on BuddyPress.
– With easily identifiable tags, similar forum+group setups can be set up with custom forums or group solutions.
– Group Forum activity can happen across categories.

[r-a-y]

Some of your problems are actually pros if you look at it in a different light.

That being said, it’s entirely possible to do what you’re asking.

The main problem is adding the group information into the sidebar. It could be accomplished by adding a conditional widget, but the widget would have to be manually placed by the site admin.

Group tags in forum threads should be quite easy to accomplish with a plugin. The group tag slug should be prefixed with “group-” or something like that to avoid conflicts with other tags.