***Updated June 3rd, 2009 and works with BB RC 1.0, BP 1.0, MU 2.7.1 *******

I notice that this forum thing is really not that easy for everyone to put in place and I had to do it several times myself to get it working properly. What worked on one server didn’t work as planned on another one. Strange, but I thought I would write this to see if it helps anyone out.

Integration Assumptions:

First off, this assumes that you are using SVN of bbPress of at LEAST 1.0 alpha 4 and nothing less. Do not try this on bbPress alpha 7 when it is released! No more than alpha 6. Buddypress beta or SVN as well. I also haven’t tested this without at least having bbPress using the WPMU user tables for integration. You also NEED to be running WPMU 2.7+ SVN or WPMU 2.7 Branch until the release of WPMU 2.7.1 as it doesn’t work on earlier versions of WPMU.

*** these are requirements for running the bp-forums integration, not buddypress in general! ***

bbPress Side (First):

1) you have bbpress installed and a new user created on the “bbPress” side which you granted “administrator” rights by the keymaster

2) you copy the “buddypress-enable.php” plugin out of the bp-forums folders and copy it into your /my-plugins/ folder (create if it doesn’t exist) so it is /my-plugins/buddypress-enable.php ****People ask about /bb-plugins/ versus /my-plugins/ and put it in /my-plugins/

3) Enable the plugin through your bbPress administration side for plugins

4) Edit “settings” to enable xmlrpc and pingbacks (both)

5) edit your bb-config.php and just before the closing php call at the bottom of the page put:

$bb->bb_xmlrpc_allow_user_switching = true;

buddypress Side (Second):

6) Go into your main blog dashboard as the “site-admin” and go to the “bbPress Forums” page. Put in the URL of your forum like http://yoursite.com/forums/ and make sure you have the ending slash on that one.

7) Put in the user that you created in step 1 with the bbPress “administration” rights and their password. I never changed the password, just used the random one it sent me, but it is up to you. I usually save it a couple of times to ensure it was entered due to a refreshing bug at time of writing this.

Go to one of your groups (new or existing) and go to the group admin page. Make sure “discussion” is turned off. If it was already off that is fine, but if it was enabled already, turn it off

9) Turn the group “discussion” back on and then physically go to your forums URL and see if it created the forum on the bbPress side without trying to create a new topic on the buddypress side.

If you have the new forum now, then you should skip to step 10. If not, go through steps 1-9 again and make sure you got all the steps perfectly.

10) If you have made it this far, it will work, but I like to create the first post in the new forum on the bbPress side and then see if it shows up in the buddypress group forum. Old habit, but for odd circumstance, it seems to work best for me. If it works, try creating a new topic on the group you have working.

***Don’t forget that you have to do step 8 for every group that was created before you enabled the forum integration! Very important***

Other notes:

1) The refreshing bug in step 7 killed it for me a couple of times and I made sure I saved it at least 2 times.

2) Forgetting the line in bb-config.php killed it for me a couple of times as well.

3) In one install I had to change the bbPress “user” with administration rights password and on the bbPress side and then completing step 7 again.

4) I also found that through “previous testing” I had some bp_groupmeta entries that were screwing things up with duplicates for the same forum in the database. Shouldn’t happen to anyone else, but that screwed some things up for me as well.

In terms of having buddypress and bbPress working together, I am sure it works with buddypress on one server and bbPress on another since it works through the xmlrpc module which makes it very powerful.

Let me know if I am out to lunch as well or you have anything else to add!

Trent

[@iamzaks Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

I tried all of this, did it no problem. However, it did not work, I managed to install bbpress 1.0 Alpha, wpmu 2.7SVN, integration works, cookies and databases. The problem is that whenever a user tried to make a post, I get this mistake:

“There was an error posting that topic.”

Also, step 9 never came true, no forums where created, but when I physically go to my forum’s address I can cerate forums and post and everything.

[@dyzine Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

without running the risk of sounding ignorant, where can i get a copy of 2.7 so that i too can attempt this install of bbpress? from the mu.wordpress site only 2.6.5 is available and i’ve googled the 2.7 but im not finding anythign anywhere. where are you guys getting your 2.7 copies? thanks

[@slaffik Moderator 15 years, 11 months ago]

trac.mu.wordpress.org – here you can find 2,7

Trent, nothing helped.

I installed or did:

1) WPMU (r1585);

2) bbPress Alpha 4;

3) integrate them properly;

4) edit bb-config.php and config.php;

5) install BuddyPress;

6) install bp-forum-enabled.php;

7) create a new admin user in bbPress;

write his login/pass to option page in WPMU;

9) create group in BP;

10) nothing changed.

What happened? Why can’t I launch forum?

[@dyzine Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

thanks slaFFik, but i searched through trac.mu.wordpress.org for quite a while and still came up short. is there not a zip download offered somewhere?

[@trent Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

@slaFFik I would check that you saved the right information in your WPMU admin for the forum user and that you have pingbacks and xmlrpc checkboxes on in bbPress. As well, you can’t have .htaccess blocking of your forums or it will not work. You can’t use the original force login plugin for bbPress (not mine) or it will not work.

You also have to make sure that you disable the forum for a group and then enable it after each and every change you make to try and get this working. If you enable it and then change more things it will not work. So basically, if it isn’t working, check over and change things to make sure it has the ability to work and then disable/enable the forum for a group. If you enable it and it isn’t working and then you change a setting so that it would work, but don’t disable forum posting and then re-enable, it still won’t work.

Hopefully that isn’t too confusing, but as long as all the settings are there and your WPMU install has access to the bbPress xmlrpc.php file, it should work. There is no doubt that Andy will eventually be doing more for the forums side of things, but it might be a couple of months.

Wish I had a magic wand to get everyone’s forums working, but really it boils down to triple checking all the settings and keep disabling/enabling forums for a group until it works.

As for the WPMU 2.7 download (before it is released), go to the bottom of the following page for the link to the zip.

https://trac.mu.wordpress.org/browser/trunk

Trent

[@trent Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

Found another tip for you all if you have tried everything and it still won’t work….

If you manage to have done everything and it seems to not work, check your bp_groups_groupmeta table and delete any entries that deal with the forum. Make sure you back things up before doing this though! If an existing entry is there for forums, it won’t allow you to create a new one!

[@moodleman Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Hi Trent,

Thankyou for all your advice. Now works like a charm.

The devil is in the details ppl. make sure you read everything!

Julian

[@trcwest Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

thanks trent got it all working nicely on spotskenya.com thanks to you

[@slaffik Moderator 15 years, 11 months ago]

Thanks Trent for your help. It works! Triple check of every step and this annoying disabling/enabling forums.

[@clubmaster Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Very helpful guide, got it working at once with WPMU2.7-bleeding edge, latest buddypress and the 1.0 Alpha install from bbpress.

Thanks

[@12thharmonic Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

Should integration with an established bbpress install be OK?

One that’s been going a while?

Cheers

[@trent Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

@12thharmonic that would work *if and only if* that install is running WPMU 2.7 and bbPress 1.0 alpha 4+ since the forum integration in buddypress needs bbPress 1.0 alpha series and that can only be integrated with WPMU 2.7 (unreleased). Don’t know of anyone that got this working with WPMU 2.6.5, but if they did, I would be interested in finding out.

Trent

[@12thharmonic Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

Thanks Trent. I’m all updated to the Bleeding edge on everything.

My BuddyPress is working just fine so far.

Thanks for the response. I love the extended WP community. Nice to have brilliant friends everywhere.

Stay Human

[@cikguazleen Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

I got this error on forum page for the group:

Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode()! in /home/teknikjb/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/bp-forums/bp-forums-filters.php on line 53

On the bbpress page, everything appeared O-kay.. There’s no such warning..

Link to group forum: http://teknikjb.net/groups/bloggers/forum

Link to bbpress forum: http://teknikjb.net/forum/topic.php?id=4

[@trent Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@cikguazleen this is a problem with earlier versions of php 4. Can you get your host to get you on php 5?

Here is an explanation about error.

Another possible explanation

Trent

[@cikguazleen Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

@Trent My server used PHP 5.2.5 .

[@trent Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

My apologies. Never saw that error when it wasn’t on php 4 before, as that seems to come out of nothing but php 4 installs. Would you mind trying something for me? Could you edit /mu-plugins/bp-forum/bp-forum-filters.php and change line 53 from:

$content = html_entity_decode( $content, ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8" );

to:

$content = utf8_decode($content);

Just want to see if that fixes it. Make sure you backup your original file before the change, so you can change it back if you need to. That might “patch” it until Andy can look at this.

Trent

[@cikguazleen Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

@Trent,

You are my hero.. Thank you for that.. It works.. Thank you soooo much!

[@christianbryant Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Thanks for all the solid documentation here. This really helped me get all the integration working.

[@socialbandit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

I found this Sceen Cast from sambauers at Automattic on the BBpress forum which goes through the install of wordpress mu 2.7 and bbpress 1 alpha. The integration of wp and bbprees is also fully shown.

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/basic-integration-screencast

[@kyleyates Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Got it working with all the great help. Thanks! I’m looking forward to when BuddyPress comes out of beta and the photo galleries are connected now that the forums seem to be working quite well.

[@dpan Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

I’m having an issue, all post are showing as made by the admin user I created. I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss any steps…

[@dpan Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

never mind I found my error, I forgot to add the line to the bb-config file

[@opiater Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

In bbpress, When I Hit the “edit” link would like set the “User Type” of the user to “Administrator”, I get “Sorry, that page was not found” in “buddypress-home” theme.

bbPress: bbpress-1.0-alpha-6

BuddyPress: 1.0b2

Wordpress MU: 2.7

All are releases not SVN

Help…

[@opiater Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Under issue is my mistake.

I activated “Name based” permalinks in bbPress but didn’t make .htaccess file for it. Sorry.

p.s. How to deal with “User Role Map” in bbPress admin interface, ignore it?