I recently had a project which required integrating bbPress (which, obviously I am a fan of) into a site built on top of the Genesis Framework.
From my experience, 90% of the integration went smoothly. There are a few things that may crop up and screw with your iteration depending on how you have your Genesis settings configured.
I have thrown together a quick (translation: rough) plugin that should keep these oddities for occurring.
As I mentioned, this plugin isn’t quite done, which is why I haven’t submitted it to the .org repo yet. However, I noticed in the bbPress forums others were having this same issue, so hopefully this can help fix the issues until a packed plugin is released.
The root of the problem boils down to Genesis archive pages. By default these archive pages use the_content – when this is the case usually things work fine. Problems start creeping up when users change the archive settings in Genesis. If you have your archives set to automatically display a post thumbnail or to crop the content output to XXX characters, things break.
bbPress does all its magic by filtering the_content to add in all of the forum goodness. When Genesis changes what is output (say by adding post images or limited the content length) things explode because that is not what bbPress is expecting. I have bought this up in Genesis Trac and it doesn’t appear a fix will be applied to core, which judging by the length of this plugin I don’t blame them, so a plugin will be needed to fix the issues.
Hope this helps. If you have any questions just leave a comment!
Hi Jared! Thank you very much for this solution, it just works perfectly for me! I’ve also tested to change your if statement a bit and found out that the combination of this works:
if ( bbp_is_custom_post_type() || is_bbpress() ) {— the “bbp_is_custom_post_type” hast to be in there otherwise the forum tags do not work properly. I’ve also added post type support for “forum” and “topic” at the top of your plugin code – so it has a bit more comfort. So I can add a body class for a special forum and have a nice styling for example.The patch from John isn’t working yet I assume some issue with the layout setting function or other functions… This is exceeding my coding experience at the moment so maybe both of you have some ideas how to implement this in bbpress core
However, thanx so much for this quick response! Very much appreciated!
-Servus, Dave from Germany
Hi Jared,
Someone I know is asking me to create them a website with a forum as part of it. They want the whole website including forum to be mobile responsive. I mostly design with Genesis themes and I know from experience that their responsive ones work really well.
I’ve never used forums before but I’m guessing that if I simply use BBPress with a Genesis responsive theme the forum part of the website will not be responsive? If I’m wrong then fantastic but I cannot seem to find any information or examples on the web.
I do see that some people have designed specific BBPress responsive themes but when I test them on my phone some are not responsive at all and some try and scale but some text seems to overlap.
In your opinion what is the best solution? I’ve also heard good things about Vanilla forums but I don’t know what the best solution is. I’m no expert coder and would like the simplest solution possible.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
Gary
Vanilla Forums is a solid product, I’ve played around with it. It’s different than bbPress, but if you do end up going that route you would be in good hands.
With that said, you can certainly do what you need to do with bbPress with a very minimal amount of tweaks.
Here’s what you’ll need.
- WordPress 3.4 (obviously)
- bbPress 2.1 http://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/4018/branches/plugin?old_path=%2F&format=zip
- A responsive Genesis theme. If you go to http://www.studiopress.com/choose-theme you can filter to show only the responsive themes.
- bbPress Genesis Extend plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-genesis-extend/
I tested a few responsive themes using the above and everything works fairly well. You still might need some CSS tweaks to hone in on a few things for mobile devices, but overall most of the adjustment is taken care of already.
Love the idea behind this plug… just wish I could get it to work fully. For instance, there is supposed to be the ability to associate a specific sidebar with a specific forum (integration with Genesis Simple Sidebars) but – for the life of me – I cannot find a settings box on the forum pages, or anywhere in order to do this.
There are a few things to double check
- Make sure you are on latest version of WordPress
- Make sure you are on Genesis 1.8.x
- Make sure you are using the plugin from the WordPress.org repo http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-genesis-extend/
- Make sure you are using bbPress 2.1
Usually one of those items is what causes it to not work.
You know what – I didn’t even notice that it was working, because it piggy-backed on the bottom of one of my existing default sidebars (which already had tons of stuff on it) and ended up way down on the bottom. At least it’s working! Still, in future, it would be great if it could be its own sidebar in and of itself without appearing attached to the default sidebar.
Thanks for your help.
If you update to 0.8.2 that I just pushed, it should fix the problem with Genesis Simple Sidebars!
Hi, Amazing Plugin Jared.
Even though I’ve specified a forum specific sidebar, the primary genesis sidebar still shows up on the main forum index page. All the other pages (forums, topics, etc) only show the new forum sidebar. But for some reason, the forum index page shows the primary sidebar, with the forum sidebar underneath it. Any idea how to remove the primary sidebar from the forum index?
Thanks,
Lucas
What child theme are you using? It shouldn’t do that, but perhaps there is something going on I need to look at. If you let me know the child theme I can run a few tests.
Jared, thanks for the quick reply. I just figured it out. It’s a conflict with the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin. When I deactivated Simple Sidebars, the forum index sidebar works they way you intended it. By the way, I’m using the Generate theme. Have you noticed any conflicts between BBP Extend and Simple Sidebars?
Hmm, I’ll look into that. The plugin has a check for Genesis Simple Sidebars, but I have’t tested it the last round of GSS updates. I’ll look into it. Thanks for the heads up.
I’m having the same problem with Simple Sidebars, which I absolutely must use on a client’s site. I’ve seen bits and ideas of fixes and workarounds, but no working code. How can I remove the default sidebar from appearing above the “forum” sidebar?
I need to know more details so I can try to replicate it. For example:
Lifestyle theme, bbpress layout is genesis default, bbpress forum sidebar enabled. etc
Just pushed 0.8.2 which should fix any issues with the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin.
Dear plugin developer,
Can you please let me know about this problem stated below:
“I’ve installed your plugin on my blog but when ever someone try to access any forum page, the plugin is not able to show the forum topics in the list on the top however it only puts out the form to add new topic at the bottom.”
Any solution
Example: http://softstribe.com/forums/forum/android-applications-forum
Please use the WordPress.org plugin forum for support.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-genesis-extend/
Okay thanks for letting me know. I’ve submitted the question on WordPress plugin support page. Please solve my problem… I’m waiting.