bbPress 2.0 Basics

bbPress 2.0 is out and I’m excited. While there is still room to grow (and JTrip will be the first to tell you this), it is a great improvement over previous versions of the plugin. Thanks John James Jacoby and the bbPress team for all your hard word; it’s greatly appreciated.

It’s easy to get up and running. Just down the plugin and activate (http://bbpress.org). It’s easy and works well. However, if you want to start customizing the layout and styles, that’s where it’s get a bit more technical and less plug-and-play. But here’s a few tips for the less obvious mechanics:

Add Forums to Navigation (2 options):

• Use Custom Links to add “/forums” to a menu (this link may differ if you change the base for forums in the forum settings)
• Create a page and use shortcode [bbp-forum-index]; add that page to a menu

Custom Theming

• Use the default (easiest option)
• Replace Styles
  • Remove the bbPress styles.css
    remove_action( ‘bbp_enqueue_scripts’, ‘bbp_theme_compat_enqueue_css’ );
  • Copy default styles to your theme’s stylesheet
    /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/bbp-themes/bbp-twentyten/css/bbpress.css
  • Adjust styles to your whimsy
• Replace template files
  • Copy files from “/bbpress/bbp-themes/bbp-twentyten” folder into the folder of your theme, and make your own edits from there. The files to copy include the single-*, archive-*, page-*, and anything in the subfolders
  • Replace all files, there is no defaulting
  • Add add_theme_support( ‘bbpress’ ); to functions.php

Shortcodes