BuddyPress.org

You may be able to ‘bridge’ phpBB, etc, into WordPress, but you’d have to probably rewrite all of the BuddyPress forum integration code. It’s non-trivial.

You can also look at simple:press – some work has been done integrating that with BuddyPress

@lisa – I share your frustration with the BuddyPress approach to forums; every client we have worked with (6 in total now) has asked for standard forums to be integrated, and not the BuddyPress Group / Forum approach.

The BuddyPress Group / Forum idea might be an interesting technical approach (and logical from a data modelling point of view), but unfortunately doesn’t seem to have been an end user requirements driven decision.

The best approach to get full functioning standards forums (working with a BuddyPress site) is to disable the BuddyPress forums (a simple checkbox in the admin system), and install your forum solution separately – you’ll then want to ensure you have single sign on, and integration with the activity stream – there is some work documented already to do this with simple:press and bbPress (search on their community forums), but I’m not aware of an out of the box fully functioning solution.

Of course, you’ll also want to design your theme to seamlessly integrate the forums.

[aside: I noticed an announcement re: bbPress being moved into WordPress as a plugin. The announcement also said it was being coded by @jjj, one of the core BuddyPress deveIopers. I don’t know how this will affect the functionality of bbPress (more or less featured?), or whether it will integrate a standalone forums solution into BuddyPress by default. Any more info on this @djpaul or @jjj?]

@ashfame – it’s not quite that simple. Yes, have a standalone installation. Then, to give smooth integration, you also want to ensure you have single sign on (i.e. not having sign on separately for both the forums and BuddyPress network), and you want to see your activity on the forums being shown in your profile activity stream on BuddyPress (this needs callback routines when events happen in the forum software, you’ll have to code these so that they call the BuddyPress activity API correctly).

@RogerCoathup
Agree with you on the fact that APIs need to be called for forum activity to show up in stream. Other than that everything else is simple and I would consider that myself.
An easy solution is to create a general group for site wide forums or use a (paid) plugin in beta by Brajesh.

Roger Coathub and Oldrow are correct; group forums may be interesting from some esoteric highly technical geek perspective, but for normal end-users it’s just not helpful, period. Why can’t it be turned off easily? I mean, I see that there’s an option to do this but then things seem to go nuts with bbPress….