BuddyPress.org

Hey guys, with all the appreciation I have for the time and effort people have put into everything that goes into creating and maintaining these fantastic, free programs, I’ve ran into a real doozy that I feel really should be explained better for people who are new to setting up BuddyPress w/ bbPress.

First off, perhaps it should be clear on the Settings page that you have to click “Save Settings” in order for the BuddyPress database tables to be created. “Save Settings” does not make that clear, and causes confusion when you’re troubleshooting and having to reinstall, etc. The checkmarks are already there when you install it, so it looks like it’s a done deal unless you decide to select something different.

Secondly, nowhere did I find in hours and days of searching, except for one small mention buried in a post that I missed the first three times I saw it, that you cannot have the urls/slug combination:

yoursite/forums/forum – for subforums of your forum

and

yoursite/groups/yourgroup/forum – for group forums

Why is this? This makes absolutely no sense, they are two totally different urls with only one word in common. In fact, the problem that was causing me the issues of not being able to set up groups or group forums (if I managed to get the groups and forums set up separately and tried to link them) was actually being caused by *two* conflicts, the above url one, and a second one where a post had “forum” as the first word!

I have spent hours testing plugins, messing with my htaccess, crashing my site, deleting and reinstalling BuddyPress, testing with other themes, researching, researching, researching (omg so fried).

So if you are out there, and you have these setups:

WordPress 3.8.1
bbPress 1.0.4
BuddyPress 1.9.2

and you are getting redirected to your forum root or somewhere else when trying to set up BuddyPress groups, or getting the “There was an error saving group details, please try again” error, check and see if you have the word “forum” or any other word that is being used as a slug or url listed in any of your bbPress and BuddyPress settings as a page or post, because it might not be a plugin conflict or any other, after all.

And if you are working on BuddyPress and bbPress, PLEASE put a warning in there somewhere obvious, so the next person doesn’t wind up feeling like their eyes are going to explode 😉 What may seem obvious to you, having been familiar with the system, takes many of us days and days to figure out, and I’ve seen a ton of unanswered posts on this issue, which is why I made a point to come back and post. My time might as well help someone if at all possible.