Hi all-

I’ve tried to reserve this forum as an absolute last resort, but I’ve gone through the bbPress install from scratch 4 or 5 times now. I’ve been following Jimgroom’s instructions HERE as well as Trent’s sticky post HERE. This last time, I have FINALLY managed to get bbPress/WPMu basic integration to work (I had a lot of problems with cookies), so now I’m hesitant to wipe the slate clean again.

The first time I went through all of this, I couldn’t get cookie integration to work, but it DID seem like bbPress was communicating with BuddyPress because when I disabled/reenabled discussions, the forum appeared on the bbPress side, but only about half the time did the posts I made appear on the BuddyPress side. And when I tried to make a new post/reply, I got the “There was an error making that post” message.

Now I have cookie integration working, but I can’t get any kind of BuddyPress integration to work and I’ve checked, rechecked, redone, restarted more times than I could possibly document.

I had a couple questions about the procedure though that might lead to what I’m doing wrong. First, Jimgroom says to delete your auth keys and let WP redo them, but he says you won’t get them all. Well I did get them all, and pasted them all into both wp-config.php and bb-config.php. However, the auth_salt and logged_in_salt keys were DIFFERENT than the ones I would get if I went into /wp-admin/options.php. Which are right?

Also, Trent says in step 6 to go into the groups admin page. I assume he means the bbPress Forums admin page?

Finally, I found the installation-readme.txt file in bp-forums, and it says to not check the cookie integration box at all when installing bbPress. It’s taken me long enough to get that to work in the first place. Could that be my problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated, and feel free to ask any other questions.

-Chad

PS- With my first post, let me also express my gratitude toward Andy and everyone else helping to develop BuddyPress. I seem to have entered the WP world at just the right time, and I’m very excited about all the possibilities. Thank you!

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Chad, welcome and don’t be scared; you’ve lurked long enough to know we don’t bite.

I’m going to answer as best as I can in probably no particular order…

In step 6, Trent is referring to the BuddyPress groups page.

Checking cookie integration works fine, and as a matter of fact I’ve always checked it, because I know that not checking it on the bbPress side leads you down a different installation path. I think it basically makes me do the work twice, because checking the box makes you enter the salts and things that we’re already hard coding into the _config files. So, no worries there.

If you check my profile and look at some of the posts I’ve started, I had similar problems and Burt was awesome enough to help me through some things, but chances are that the IXR just isn’t linking up somewhere…

Let me see if I can find exactly how Burt suggested to debug this, but it worked really well and got me up and on my way in a few minutes, after a few hours of banging my head against it.

[@chadfrancis Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Hey John or anyone. I’m /bumping this because I don’t if you’ve had time to dig up what my problem might be, but I didn’t want to be forgotten. I’ve had other things to work on and group forums aren’t my biggest concern, but I would like to get it resolved so I can have it off of my mind. Thanks!

-Chad

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Haven’t forgotten, just couldn’t find the topic.

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=426

This topic is ultimately what helped me. I used his little $burt variable trick to help see if the two platforms were communicating in the back end, and it turned out they weren’t. This sounds like where you’re getting stuck as well.

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

chadfrancis, if all else fails you can try this and see if bp and bbpress *can* communicate with this tool. It just creates a xmlrpc link between bp and bbpress using your config settings on both sides. All it does is say ‘hello’ from bbpress to bp if the link works.

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’. It’s by no means pretty but it might help.

[@martinnr5 Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Also make sure that you read through the entire thread Trent started because there’s a lot of useful stuff buried in the following posts.

[@chadfrancis Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Hey there. Finally had time to go into it. It actually took me a little time to figure out how to work your plugin. I think I did it right: I put oci_bb_say_hello.php into my-plugins in bbPress and oci_bp_say_hello.php into plugins in WPMU. Activated the bbPress one first, then went into WPMU and activated that one. It returned that the plugin could not be activated because of a fatal error: string(13) “Hello from BB”

Sooo I’m not sure if that’s what you mean by bbpress says ‘hello,’ but the group forums still aren’t working, so if that’s what’s supposed to happen, I guess I have different problems.

I’ll tell you one more thing I’m experiencing. People keep mentioning “Group Forums” in the admin area to edit the forum url and login info. I don’t see that, just “bbPress Forums,” but it seems to be the same information. Am I missing something there? Thanks for your help!

-Chad

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

You’re correct, it should be “bbPress Forums”

I am sort of out of ideas really. The tools and topics we’ve linked you to should be enough info to troubleshoot a non functioning situation. Hmmm…

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Chad. On the bp side that’s what it would say in the admin area if it’s working. You got back what it should show. Your installation and configuration passes a couple of tests.

1) bp is talking to bbpress. Your configuration url, username and password were recognized by bbpress as valid. What it doesn’t check is the role that the user in bbpress plays. It has to be an ‘administrator’ role in bbpress to allow forum creation. Anything less will fail on the bp side with the usual cryptic error message. Make sure your ‘connection’ user has the proper role.

2) xmlrpc is working between the two applications. This is good.

What I don’t understand about your situation is that you say that the problem is intermittent. If it works once then it should work every time if nothing has changed in your configuration between posts.

Are bp and bbpress installed on the same server? Asking to see if anything could interrupt the communications channel between the two.

When testing posts, are you using the same or different users?

When testing are you using the same group forum to test things?

When testing do you create a group and have the ‘enable forums’ checkbox checked so that the group and the forum are created at the same time? Or do you go in afterward and enable the forum after group creation?

[@chadfrancis Member 15 years, 9 months ago]

BP and bbPress ARE on the same server–I can’t imagine it’s anything there. (Though it IS GoDaddy, and I remain nervous that I’m finally experiencing all the horror stories I hear.)

I have my admin account as well as two test accounts (test and test2) that I switch between to try things. Test2 is the account I set up administrator privileges for on the bbPress side.

I am using the group forum to test things. The couple times the forum showed up on the bbPress side through BP discussion activation, I have tried posting on that side, and it posts there fine, but the same issues remain on the BP side.

I actually went back and made a new group upon you mentioning that last bit. (I’d been using one “Test Group” and turning discussions off and on as needed.) I enabled discussions from the beginning and actually got it it to work for a bit. The forum showed upon the bbpress side, and I could post a topic on the BP side successfully and have it show up. HOWEVER, when I logged on to my “test” user, it was all back to the same (not there). Then I started screwing with things and jacked everything up (“note to admin: bbPress must be installed for group discussions to work” or something like that), so I’ll probably have to start from scratch again.

When I do, I have a new question: Since I got just a basic bbPress forums to work completely with integration (under /forums/), I kinda want to make group forums it’s own separate thing (under /bbpress-groups/ or something). I’ve heard a couple other people mention they have tried multiple bbPress installs. Besides changing the database prefix (to bb2_ or whatever), is there anything else you would have to switch around getting things to work. For example, the plugins on the WPMU side used for integration.

Another new question: When I’m deleting the bb data to restart from scratch, I’ve been deleting that whole folder (/forums/) and then going into mySQL and deleting all the database files that begin with bb_. Is there anything else I’m missing? I ask because the last time I started from scratch, I got this weird header malfunction the last time I finished the bbPress install, but I haven’t noticed any problems after that one “Install Complete” page.

At some point, this will all get worked out. Thanks for your continued support!

-Chad

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

Hello, well it seems you are still experiencing intermittent problems with your bp/bbpress install. These are always fun to debug. You are covering alot of ground explaining things and I’d like to narrow things down.

Lets play with two users and two groups. Site admin will be one user and pick any other existing user. Pick any existing group that has forums enabled and create a new group with forums enabled.

1) Using existing group, site admin test posting FROM BP

2) Using existing group, other user test posting FROM BP

3) Using new group, site admin test posting FROM BP

4) Using new group, other user test posting FROM BP

5) Using existing group, site admin test posting FROM BBPRESS

6) Using existing group, other user test posting FROM BBPRESS

7) Using new group, site admin test posting FROM BBPRESS

Using new group, other user test posting FROM BBPRESS

‘test posting’ means new topic and reply in that topic