***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

[@jimthedj65 Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Opiater: I would set the user role map as admin = master key editor = moderator and the rest as member

This is my understanding and reading between the lines.. I get stuck at step 3 for the rpc settings it doesnt appear when I install the plugin, but this could be a total misunderstanding about where the xml rpc settings should be changed….

[@jimthedj65 Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Amazing what a lunch break and a sanity check can do for an oldskool internet guy…. I found that by installing the BBPRESS aplpha version onto my wpmu 2.7 and latest BB SVN as of Feb 4th 09 build it all works nicely..

thank you to everyone on this thread and to trent for a great write up, would never have got it working without it… I mixed a bit with the video followed the details and then downloaded the alpha version as the latest BBPRESS 0.9.0.4 didn’t work for me but the latest alpha build does…..

I can actually go and finalise my house renovation without any issues now.. THANK YOU everyone involved with BP big thumbs up

[@oldskoo1 Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Thanks for this guide, very helpful!

I was trying to get this working myself before i found this.

2 things that were a must for me…

Alpha version on bbpress was the only version that worked

Don’t touch the cookie integration, skip that bit and just do the DB integration.

Oh and there is a problem with duplicate content if you care about google spidering it if users find the default forum and link to it.

There just add a robots.txt file with

User-agent: *

Disallow: /bbpress/

You could probably put a header redirect on it too to stop people using it and only using the bp side.

[@martinnr5 Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Almost everything works for me, the only problem I have is that when a user browses to the forum they aren’t automatically logged in and need to log in specifically to the forum despite being logged in to my BP site. I’ve gone over the cookie integration twice and still no luck.

BP group integration works like a charm though.

I’m running latest BP and bbPress version 1.0-alpha-6.

Any ideas on where to start troubleshooting?

[@djpaul Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

MartinNr5.

Clear your cookies, then after logging in both places, view your cookies in like Firefox. I am assuming that they should be named something like wordpress_ and wordpress_f5433ed3c296d4543 (where the letters after the underscore is a hash).

In both your wordpress and bbpress config files, add the following:

define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', '.example.org');

define('COOKIEPATH', '/');

define('COOKIEHASH', 'f5433ed3c296d4543');

Log out, clear cookies, and it should work.

[@martinnr5 Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Thanks Paul.

I initially didn’t have any cookies like that but that’s because I never checked any of the “remember me” checkboxes when logging in.

It all works now.

[@bobman024 Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Ok so…I have successfully installed bbpress, WPMU and buddypress via the instructions here…Still getting this when trying to create forum: “Attention Site Admin: Group forums require correct setup and configuration of a bbPress installation.”

I have ran through the steps 10 times and have MU 2.7, bbpress 1.0-alpha-6 & Buddypress beta 2.

I also should know that in dev, I followed all the same steps and had success. Would there be any reason why cookies work, duplicate log-ins work and yet no forum sync up?

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Question about step 1.

You say that the user has to be created on the “bbPress” side. Does this refer to a user that is registered through register.php via the forums? What if my forums were integrated from day 1 with WordPress? Is it okay to just use the “admin” keymaster account?

Question about permalinks and .htaccess.

I am using pretty permalinks on the bbPress side, and there is an .htaccess file on the root of the bbpress install folder. What would I want to look out for to prevent this from causing a problem?

Question about “deep integration”

I am currently including my wp-blog-header.php file inside my bb-config.php file. Will this cause conflicts?

Question about what to do if I swear I’ve followed the steps the way they are written and the ways everyone else has said, and it isn’t working.

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

John, the user you use for group forums just has to have an ‘Administrator’ role or better. Keymaster should work. You should be aware that the password for that user is stored on the wpmu side in plain text in the blog 1 meta data table. Gotta have access to phpmyadmin to get it but..

Your permalinks on the bbpress side don’t have anything to do with it at all. XMLRPC is used and the only query for any type of asset by URL is to the xmlrpc.php file. Permalinks don’t come into play at all. As long as the wpmu side can find your site’s root url and the xmlrpc.php file that is supposed to live there all is well.

Don’t know about the deep integration question.

I followed all the steps and it still wasn’t working. I was doing everything right. I did everything right about 10 times. Still wasn’t working. This thread is me finding out why: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=426

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

The part I slam my head against is that it DID work, one time. It created the forum, remember that’s how I knew it appended “-forum” at the end of it. It hasn’t worked since that day… And I don’t know what I did… If anythng… Arg… Ha!

That’s a good post though… I’ll try your debugging method and see what I get out of it… Is there a sure-fire way to check if the bridge between the two apps is playing nice, say by echo’ing a value somewhere to see which directories it’s pointing to, etc?

[@ifoundyou Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Hi Ok I am thinking about installing the forums. However, these directions are not clear. Lets start at the beginning for everyone shall we. Should I create a folder

called forums and inside forums put my-plugins? Should I download the BP Press into the forum directory.

Regards, Charles Pisano

[@ifoundyou Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

I am attempting to install the forum myself now. Ok so what I did first was to go ahead and in the root dirctory created a folder called forums. Next, what I did was to go ahead and download from wordpress the bp press forum module. Is this correct so far?

Regards,

Charles Pisano

[@trent Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

You can put the forum wherever you want to be honest, but my directions was assuming you knew what bbPress is. It is a completely seperate software package and needs to be installed somewhere In my example it was mydomain.com/forum/ and I installed it from downloading from https://bbpress.org/download/

That is the first step and most people install it so that it uses the same userbase from your WPMU install (which is part of the bbPress installation steps)

Hope that makes it clear.

Trent

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@john.. no there isn’t anything like a ‘hello’ you can do. There is an xmlrpc function that does that but you have to have the link between them working for it to return anything. Lemme see what I can cobble together from the bbGroups plugin. I actually used that ‘say hello’ fn to see if I had a link going or if it was just my plugins not working right.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Burt, no need… I got it working using your trick in the other topic… I posted my fix there also because I didn’t want to confuse my personal issue with others’ global successes…

Either way, it’s working 100% now… Perfectly.

Woo woo!

[@ifoundyou Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Ok can anyone tell me where to install the bbpress is it

wp-content plugins?

mu-plugins?

maybe it is mu-plugins/bbpress hmmmmm

Where does one put the my-plugin folder hmmm

Regards Charles Pisano

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

./wordpress-mu-root-dirctory/whatever-you-want

Mine is at delsolownersclub.com/discussions/

You just need to make sure you reference that directory everyplace you need to within BuddyPress and bbPress to make sure they see each other.

[@ifoundyou Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

What is this thing called keymaster? What is the link to install bbpress? Was it a

good idea to install the bbpress in wp-conent/plugins or is it beter to perhaps

put it in mu-plugins maybe create a new directory in the root and call it forums.

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

Regards, Charles Pisano

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

No there’s no debug mechanism for the group forums. It’s supposed to just be correct. Here’s a little test rig I created that just tests the connection link between mu and bbpress.

http://ourcommoninterest.org/downloads/xmlrpc-test-rig.zip

It’s a wpmu client plugin and a bbpress server plugin. All it does is use the settings found in site admin > bbpress forums and makes bbpress say ‘hello’.

Uses the URL, username, and password. Authenticates them and says ‘hello’.

[@mattkg Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Just to add to the historical record: I installed BuddyPress on a working WPMU install and got a blank screen of death. It turned out that the problem had to do with the 16M limit in the php.ini file. Upping that limit solved the problem.

[@wekko Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

Trent, thank you for your instructions. It got me much further in integrating buddypress and bbpress. Unfortunately I still run into the “There was an error posting that reply.” error. I’ve tried everything with no luck, now I think it might have something to do with the fact that I’m running Buddypress/BBPress on a Windows machine (in Apache though). Can anyone confirm this? I enabled the CURL extension for PHP, but that didn’t help.

I tried the Buddypress and BBPress versions from the SVN respositories, still no luck. Anyone got suggestions left?

[@mattkern Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

After spending an hour on this, I realized that the forum settings in my BP dashboard were being set in my blog dashboard – NOT in the root dashboard. Wow.

Glad to have it working but why is that site-admin section even in the “blog” admin section?

Its always the little things, right?

[@oldskoo1 Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

Developers using faked host file domains

This only applies if you are developer with a PC and a development server and you are faking domains in your hosts file.

As part of the bbPress integration procress you have to login to wp-admin > bbPress forums and then you need to put in the URL of the bbPress forums so WPMU/BP can connect to them.

Now if you are using a faked domain from a hosts file on your PC but your code is on a dev server and that faked domain DOES NOT exist in DNS then you must add that faked domain to the hosts file of your dev server.

If you don’t WPMU will not connect to bbPress until that domain exists in DNS or you fake it on the server too. Because, you enter a full URL in the settings that allow WPMU/BP to connect to bbPress. The server looks up that URL, it doesn’t exist in DNS and therefore won’t connect.

[@mattkern Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

I have managed so I can now post, but I still get the “There was an error posting that reply.” if anyone but me (the main admin in bbpress) tries to post. No else seems to have permission to do start new topics or reply.

[@mattkern Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

OK, I am starting to realize my next wrong turn. This is my first dive into BBpress and when the topic of this post said “assuming you have wpmu and bbpress all set up” – I thought I did, but I didn’t.

BBPress Newbs FYI:

There is a whole cookie/hash integration that has to happen that I have not looked at yet. Here are 2 great resources on the topic

http://umwblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Integrating_WPMu,_BuddyPress,_and_bbPress

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