Lawyers Attorneys Legal Office Responsive Theme Help Desk

This tutorial is kindly provided by the plugin developer.

Step by step guide to setting up a bbPress forum

bbPress is a plugin for wordpress that adds forum capability to your site.

bbPress uses your site’s styling where it can to try and match your themes style. This can work really well on some themes, but doesn’t work well on others, so some styling will be needed.

Setting up wordpress requires some or all of the following stages depending on how you want it to look.

The instructions here:

1. Install the plugin

2. Set up some test forums or import a forum

3. Create a wordpress page for your forum display

4. Amend any other settings

5. Hidden vs. public forums – decide which or a mixture suits you

6. Decide on registration/user logins – automatic or manual?

7. Manually adding users to your forum – if you have chosen this route.

8. Make sure bbPress uses the page template we want

9. Add a custom sidebar or use existing sidebar with conditional logic

So let’s get started.

1. Installing the plugin

So we’ll assume you have a site with wordpress installed

Go to Dashboard > plugins > add new

Type ‘bbpress’ into the search, and it should find the latest version.

Install and activate.

2. Set up some test forums

Go into Dashboard > forums > add new

Add a forum called whatever you want, but you need at least one to get the forum page going – you can always delete it later.

Then go into Dashboard > topics and create a new topic. Again you can trash this later, but you’ll want to see what one looks like.

Ok, so now we have bbpress with one forum and one topic, but we’ll need to show it somewhere.

*Alternative - Import a forum

If you’re bringing forums in, then you need to import them via

Dashboard > tools > forums and tab ‘import forums’

HOWEVER this is a bit of a catch 22.

You can spend a lot of time importing large or non standard forums.

You may do better to doing 2 above – ie creating some test forums, and complete the steps below to see if the forum will look right for you before investing time in importing.

On the other hand you don’t want to spend hours styling bbpress to find out that your forum won’t convert.

3. Creating a forum page

Now we have some forums, we need to have somewhere to display them.

There are two ways to do this. Most themes support method 1, and this can (can not will) produce tighter theme integration on style. However Method 2 allows you to have some introductory words.

Method 1

This requires a couple of checks first
a. In Dashboard > settings > forums look for what is set in the forum root under the forum root slug heading. The default is ‘forums’ but you can set this to anything

b. In Dashboard > settings > permalinks check that the common settings check is set to ‘postname’ If it isn’t and you don’t want to change it, then use method 2.

Now just create a wordpress page that has the heading that was found in a. above eg if the root slug is ‘forums’ create a page with the title ‘forums’, and save.

Once the permalink has been created, you can rename the page to whatever you wish eg ‘mysite forums’ (as the permalink will stay the same, and it is this permalink that bbpress looks for)

Save this page, add it to a menu if you are using custom menus, or decide its order if you have automatic menus. Then publish it to your site.

Method 2

If either your theme doesn’t work with method 1, you don’t want permalinks with postname, or you want to use some introductory text (eg “welcome to our forums…”, then method 2 is for you.

In dashboard > pages > add new page

Call this ‘Forums’ or whatever you want your menu item to be.

Then in the content section, you may want to have some introductory words “welcome to the forum” etc. then add the following bbpress shortcode

[bbp-forum-index]

Save this page, add it to a menu if you are using custom menus, or decide its order if you have automatic menus. Then publish it to your site.

You will now have a forum page, and a forum to display.

4. Amending any other settings

There are several parameters which you can set to get bbPress working as you want it.

These are accessed via Dashboard > Settings > forums

See http://codex.bbpress.org/forum-settings/ for further details

5. Forum Visibility and access

You can use a combination of forum visibility and registration to set up who can :

see your forums
post in your forums

5.1. Forum visibility:

Public – Anyone can see these forums
Private – Only logged in registered users can see these forums
Hidden: Only Moderators/Admins can see these forums

Visibility is set for each forum, go into Dashboard>forums> and when you add/edit a forum, you will see visibility options on the right hand side in the forum attributes.

Forum access
You can set whether users need to be registered and control the registration process.

These two controls give you various degrees of control.

Public viewing, public posting

By default forums are available to be publically viewed. If you set anonymous posting to be on (see 4. Above) then anyone can also post. This is the most public version of the forum. It can lead to lots of spam being posted, and does hand control of what’s said in your forums to the internet community, with you effectively being able to only delete afterwards.

Public viewing, registered user posting

Here anyone can view the forums, but only registered users can join in and post. Registration can be automatic or manual – see 6. below.

Private viewing, registered user posting

Here you have a private forum. Only registered users can view and post. Here it would be very unusual to allow automatic registration, and this will be typically a manual process. To set a forum as private go into dashboard>forums and select edit for the forum you wish to be hidden. Under the forum attributes on the right hand side, set visibility to private.

6. Automatic vs manual registration

If you do not permit anonymous posting, then your users will need to register with your site. It is up to you to decide which method is preferable.

Automatic registration is easier and it does allow people to quickly sign up, but by the same token gives you less control over who is contributing to your forums, and can lead to spam postings.

Manual signup involves you in more administration, but does give you complete control over who has write access.

To allow automatic registration, go to Dashboard > Settings > General settings and under membership, tick “anyone can register”. Then in Dashboard > settings > forums tick the auto role, and ensure this is only at participant level.

To set manual registration, go to Dashboard > Settings > General settings and under membership, and ensure “anyone can register” is not ticked. Then in Dashboard > Settings > forums tick the auto role, and ensure this is only at participant level.

In both cases, you will then need a screen for users to register – we’ll come back to where to put this screen later, but for the moment go into Dashboard > pages > add new page and create a page. You can call this page anything you like but “register” or “registration” would be logical when users view or access its URL.

If you are doing automatic registration, then put whatever preamble you’d like (“to register for our forums” etc.), and then add the following shortcode [bbp-register]. Save the page.

If you opt for manual registration, then you’ll either need to get your users to email you, or set up a contact form for them to use.

To get you going quickly, maybe just set the page to have you preamble followed by an email link such as

<a href="mailto:admin@mysite.com?subject=Register&body=Name:%0AEmailaddress:%0A">email us your details here </a>

Remember to write this in the “text” tab of the content, so that the html is understood.

There are lots of contact form plugins, which you can use later to get a registration form going on this screen. By all means set this up now, but a placeholder email will get you enough to see how it works.

So now we have a page where our users can register.

7. Manually adding forum users to your site and editing them.

If you have opted for manual registration (and it’s what I do), then when you receive either a contact form or email as set up in 6 above, you’ll need to add each user.

Go into Dashboard > users > add user

Enter their details as required. You can use the “send email” to automatically send them their details from within your site, or you can email external to the site afterwards using your favourite software. I use an email template within outlook as I can then send “joining instructions” and “forum rules” as part of the signup.

You’ll not see any bbPress forum related user options/settings at this stage.

If you want to amend access level – say to make a user a moderator, then you’ll need to create the user first, and then go back into edit, and now you’ll see an option at the bottom of the amend screen to allow you to change access levels.

Manually adding users also allow you to take away the “toolbar” , which i feel always draws away from the look and feel of the site.

WHERE HAVE WE GOT TO?

So we now have a forum (or two) on a page which is accessible from the menu. We’ve decided if any/all forums will be hidden, and who and when people can contribute. We’ve set up a registration process (albeit the manual one might be a bit basic).

However we’ve not given anyone a place to logon, or indeed register, or anywhere where they can see the latest posts.

You can do this by adding these into a sidebar, or if you are using a full-width page, but adding them to a menu.

But first you need to see if you need to change what page template bbPress is using for your site.

8. Make sure bbPress uses the page template we want

By default bbPress will use a page template in your theme root folder .

It will look for the existence of several files in the following order, using the first one it finds.

plugin-bbpress.php
bbpress.php
forums.php
forum.php
generic.php
page.php
single.php
index.php

Typically most (but not all) themes have a page.php, so if you do nothing else, chances are that that’s the one it will use.

But you may want bbpress to display differently than the template it chooses for instance you might want your forum on a full width page and find that it uses a sidebar template, or visa versa.

You can even find that bbPress appears differently when displaying the forum index than it does with topics, which is probably not what you want. Nowadays theme developers will quite often use “if…” code within the page template to change the display of types of pages. Since topics share the same characteristics as posts, but the index page is more like an “about” page, the theme can believe that it should show then in different ways.

If bbPress is using the page layouts you want, then that’s fine, and you can ignore the rest of this section.

If not, then the following will let you set bbPress up in the way you want.

You theme will have page templates in the root of the directory, that is :

wp-content/themes/%mytheme%/ where %mytheme% is your theme’s name.

You’ll need to find the name of the page template that you want to use. Look in your theme’s directory – normally they are named very obviously – eg pagefullwidth or pagesidebar. If it’s not obvious, you can see what the template is called by editing a page that has the correct layout, and looking at the name of the template on the right hand side of the edit screen in a panel under the publish/update panel. If you then open the various page.php files, you see that they are named in the first few lines, so you can easily match the name.

So once you know which page template file you need, copy this and rename the copy to bbpress.php

Place this file in the root of your theme ie wp-content/themes/%mytheme%/bbpress.php where %mytheme% is your theme’s name.

bbpress will the use this file for all it’s pages.

If you want to customise the layout for your forums, you can then do this within this file.

We’ll do all that now with a forum sidebar.

9. Creating a forum specific sidebar

If you are using a sidebar for your forum – and in many cases this looks great, the you’ll want/need to add some forum specific widgets to your sidebar.

If your forum is all that is on your site, then the default sidebar may be all you need.

But for most sites, the forum is part of a larger experience, and it is really useful to have a separate sidebar for the forum page that has forum specific widgets on it.

The forum specific sidebar has a login, a list of forums, recent topics and replies.

This can be achieved many ways, but perhaps the easiest is using a plugin called bbPress WP tweaks.

This adds a forum specific sidebar.

In Dashboard > plugins > add new do a search for bbpress wp tweaks. Install this and activate

Then go into Dashboard > appearance > widgets and at the bottom right of the screen, you’ll see a new sidebar “bbPress sidebar”

Into this drop some or all of the following :

Bbpress login widget

Title – whatever you want but suggest Login

Register URL – the url of your register page eg’ http://mysite.com/register’ without the quotes

Lost password URL – type in ‘/lost-password’ without the quotes

(bbPress) forums list

Title – whatever you want

Parent forum ID – enter 0 if you want the top level

(bbPress) recent topics

Title – whatever you want

Max topics to show – enter a no.

Parent forum ID – if you want all, type ‘any’

And choose what info you want to display and in what order

You can then add other widgets as you wish.

9. Adding forum menu items

If you don’t use sidebars or footers to display your login and register items, (or even if you do you) you’ll probably want to add these as menu items.

You can do this quite easily by using bbPress shortcodes

If you are using custom menus, then you can simply add a page and put the login and register shortcodes into each

[bbp-login] – Display the login screen.
[bbp-register] – Display the register screen.
[bbp-lost-pass] – Display the lost password screen.