Bringin’ sexy to…bbPress?
“bbPress is still like the Wild West.”
This is what Chris Hajer had to say about bbPress in a forum topic about a year ago.
This statement still holds true today. There isn’t a vast database of knowledge like we have with the WordPress Codex. There are only a handful of useful plugins.
More importantly, there aren’t enough themes.
The themes out there look a lot like the choices we had a few years ago with WordPress: solid foundations for a system in its infancy.
I think a lot of WordPress users shy away from using bbPress as their forum software because there’s just not as many choices as there are with other forum packages when it comes to themes.
Well, I’m going to try and change that.
What’s bbPress?
If you don’t know what bbPress is, then you can always read about it at the bbPress Site.
In a nutshell, it’s forum, or message board, software by our beloved WordPress team.
From the bbPress about page:
bbPress is plain and simple forum software, plain and simple. It’s easy to use, easy to administrate, fast and clean. But don’t let its simplicity deceive you; underneath the gleam, it’s got some powerful features and is highly customizable.
Coming bbPress themes
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t blogged much lately, this is why. I’ve been busily putting together five different bbPress themes. This sytem is a beast that’s not easily tamed.
Here’s a gallery of what’s to come. Note that two of the themes are for Project M’s design (support and ideas forum themes).
I know, they’re not too advanced yet, but these are just the initial templates. I’ll try to branch out with the designs a bit.
Pushing for more bbPress users
This is my way of asking more people to move over to bbPress.
It’s in its infancy, but the more people we have working on it and using it, the better it becomes.
If you’re using one of my WordPress themes, you can look forward to an accompanying bbPress theme.
What do you think?
Everything’s pretty basic right now, but I had to get the design elements down. The most important thing is to make solidly coded themes to build upon.
I’m sure I’ll be adding neat things such as tabs to the sidebar, so don’t worry about that.
I’ll also be releasing some alpha versions of the Options and Structure themes for bbPress in my forums. So, if you’re using one of those WordPress themes and are interested in testing, check out the bbPress testing thread in the forums.
That dark theme is wicked. It would be cool to clikc on the link on my dark theme and see the forum looking like that.
It would be like if I were still on my site, lol
Wow! This is looking great! Well done sir!
Hi Justin,
Wow… “the more people we have working on it and using it, the better it becomes.”.. yes.. of course. I looking forward to the launch of Project M and new bbPress themes.
What an outstanding effort.. Keep growing boy.. I know you have the passion of being the wordpress geek. I hope.
I love all the new designs, especially the ‘options’ theme styled forum design… It looks fantastic.
Thanks a lot.
Tharique Azeez
Justin,
I see, you lost vast amount of energy on creating bbPress themes. For me, I made one for a customer, and it was really a headache. First, because, I was new to bbPress, and secondly because, it has so many templates to build. It took me 17 days to complete it.
What about someone making all this for free? I agree it’s time to lure people towards the MADE IN WORDPRESS with the slogan “Code is Poetry”. Because, I would not recommend a WordPress fan to use SMF, PHPbb or another standalone forum software once there’s specialized WordPress forum.
Since I am Options fan, I downloaded Options bbPress theme alpha.
What about positioning blocks different than the usual forum layouts?
Or adding new sources?
I think a forum does not have to look same as any other one, you might check this one: forum.3oneseven.com and say your thoughts.
Btw: what about a comment subscription option? I’ve built one into the functions file, works like a charm.
Hi Justin, you are damn right!
bbpress needs more users, and more users need more themes and support!
I’d like to use this forum for its easily implementation with wp, but the lack of themes and new plugins makes me wait for something better.
I’m sure that with the M project you will help us to use this solid forum!
I like very much all your themes, in particular the options two themes.
Great work!
You’re making a great point here, Justin!
I’m in the process of creating a new BBPress design for my own forum (which I’m actually integrating into my Blogger powered blog!).
It’s taken me a little more time to understand how the template system works for BB Press than it did for other platforms, though so far I’m very pleased with the results
Once the design is complete, I’ll pop my link here for you to take a look.
What interested me most about BB Press is the plugin system. At the moment, there don’t seem to be many available (and only a handful of templates too), so if you have the time to develop any, i would certainly be interested to use them!
I also like the idea of using BB Press as a support system, a feature I haven’t seen in other forum platforms, free or paid!
Thanks for raising awareness of this, Justin!
I love WordPress, but if I remember correctly, the last time I tried bbPress, it did not include the most basic feature of a forum software, email subscription to post updates. Am I wrong?
steupz
Thanks. I’ve been avoiding working with the Dark style since the WordPress version was released because I had used it too much. It was refreshing to look at it placed on top of bbPress.
Avi
Thanks. Maybe I can get you to move over to bbPress with your forum, especially if you decide to make it a permanent feature on your site.
It’ll at least kind of centralize how you run your entire site.
Tharique Azeez
Thanks for the compliments. I’m hoping to continue advancing with bbPress. It’s kind of like what WordPress would’ve been like at the beginning if it were coded from the ground up.
Maybe I can offer a few different “options” with the Options theme version in the official release.
J Mehmett
Definitely let me know how the alpha version is working. I’m sure there are a lot of kinks that need to be worked out.
I agree that it can be a headache working with all the templates. It also breaks things down into smaller chunks of code, which is nice sometimes. It’s definitely something different than we’re used to working with.
milo
The initial designs are meant to be pretty basic and representative of the WP themes. Ultimately, I’d like to do some standalone themes for bbPress with some different layouts. I might even toss a few variations in there for the Options theme, since it is supposed to be loaded with options.
Your forums are definitely an inspiration for those looking to branch out with design a bit, which is something I’d like to do with upcoming themes, both in WordPress and bbPress.
Just a little extra tidbit: I’m currently working on a grunge-type style for Options, which will definitely look a lot different than the other styles in terms of layout and design. I’m not sure when I’ll have this finished though. It’ll probably be another couple of months.
edoluz
Yes, we have to just try to keep the community growing. I’m trying to do my part by releasing some themes, so I hope we have more users and developers hopping on the bbPress bandwagon.
Amanda
I’d love to see your theme once it’s done. There’s not a lot of documentation, themes, or plugins, but I hope once Version 1.0 of bbPress comes out, a lot of this will change.
I think the biggest thing we need to get is some documentation on how things work. Most theme developers don’t want to take the time scouring through the functions files just to see how to do something as simple as create a list of forum names, which is what I had to do for the sub-nav you see with the Options theme ports.
IndieLab
You’re not wrong. However, what you just said is one reason WordPress is so popular: it’s highly extensible through plugins. Plus, with bbPress, they have a little hindsight with how a plugin system should work.
It was made to be extremely lightweight, so users could add the features they want through plugins.
I think this is great! I’ve just recently started making “matching forums” for WordPress sites using bbPress, and you are so right about the knowledge base, etc. I applaud any effort to promote bbPress, as it’s got the potential to be THE forum platform out there like its big brother, WordPress.
Here is my own site that I made a matching bbPress forum for - it’s brand new. Easy Blog Help and the forum Easy Blog Help FORUM
Hey, I resemble that remark.
I guess I did say that about a year ago, and you’re absolutely right, the project is still lacking. I spend a little time every day at the bbPress forum, trying to help where I can, because there are some things that WordPress users have come to expect that just don’t exist yet in bbPress. I want to see bbPress succeed.
I am not certain that one theme for bbPress and one for WordPress is the way to go. With tens of thousands of themes for WordPress available, it would be impossible to create bbPress-compatible themes to match them all. There is currently no good method for reusing parts of your WordPress theme for bbPress. (I know there is the
require_once(path/to/wp-blog-header.php);method, but that creates a lot of unnecessary overhead in bbPress, and WordPress steps on some bbPress functions.It is nice to see someone doing proper themes for bbPress though. Keep up the good work.
Chris Hajer
Sherry
You’re right when you say it has “the potential to be THE forum platform.” Keep plugging away at those bbPress themes.
Maybe we’ll get that documentation sometime soon. Of course, we could be writing the documentation ourselves.
Chris
I don’t think making bbPress themes to match WordPress themes is necessarily the way to go either because there are so many WP themes that we’d have to catch up on.
I do plan to add this as a feature to package along with my WordPress themes though. Quite a few of my WP theme users have been trying to integrate their themes visually or want to be able to run a forum without the hassle of integrating styles, so I figured, why not? Plus, maybe it’ll push a few more people toward using bbPress.
I’m entirely against including the
wp-blog-header.phpfile in bbPress. I’ve tried it before too. I think we should let plugin authors come up with creative ways to get content from WP over into our forums.Whenever things settle down a bit (like that’ll ever happen around here), I’d like to do some standalone themes for bbPress. I think it’d be neat to explore some different layout / visual aspects with the themes. Of course, I’m a WordPress designer, so most of my work will be on that system, unless I can ever quit my dayjob.
I too want to see bbPress succeed in every way that WordPress has thus far.
Justin - nice to see you banging the bbPress drum, it’s a good product that whilst still in its infancy certainly shows promise. In fact I’ve been so inspired that I’ve used it for a forum on my own blog http://forum.mybarnconversion.com/ … although it needs some further work and promotion…
Which plugins would you recommend - and as I’m a WP plugin developer considering bbPress what plugins would you like to see for bbPress?
mbc
The most useful type of plugins would be ones that grabbed information from the WordPress install, such as latest blog posts, comments, etc. Things like that would be what most WordPress users would look for out of bbPress plugins.
Of course, I’m only thinking in terms of WordPress bloggers. There’s an entirely other set of users that don’t use WordPress at all, but want a lightweight forum solution.
Outside of integration with WordPress, making plugins that offer more traditional forum capabilities will be the other big thing. Some people don’t want to use bbPress because it is too lightweight, which I consider a feature of the software itself.
I just found this post searching for people mentioning a lack of themes for bbpress, because I just installed it a few days ago. When I started looking for themes I was quite disappointed because there didn’t seem to be much variety or quantity…
My (very new) forum is at briterwebdesign.com/forum/, I just used the theme that came with bbpress to make my custom one.
Anyway Justin, will be looking forward to your future bbpress themes :-).
Options in grunge style? Might show me a mockup =)
Wow, I think I will try out bbPress for two new forums that I am thinking of adding on to my blogs.
hi there! this is awesome work, thanx justin!
i would love to use a bbpress forum on my site in a few weeks or month but love to use the “light” design from the options theme. do you think i can change the “options blue” to the “light” design?
i’m sorry to ask because you’re doing so much awesome things here but maybe i can change it myself or someone here can made a port.
no problem i will think make the forum live this fall so it’s still a lot of time
thanx again, dave
Jylan Wynne
Well, maybe I’ll release something that’ll work for you in the future.
milo
It’s in a very early development stage. You’ll definitely get to see it when it’s closer to fruition.
EmmaB
Cool. Glad to have you hopping on the bbPress bandwagon.
daveshine
I plan on releasing a Light style for the Options bbPress theme too. I just don’t know if I’ll have it out quite as early as the others.
Of course, if you need to put one together earlier than that, the Blue Danube style would be easier to work with.
You did a great job with these.
My next theme is definitely going to be 960px.
I’ve added your themes to the demo list here:
http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/available-themes
and you can test your theme via the switcher:
http://bbshowcase.org/forums/?bbtheme=bbpress-structure
For some reason the “Options” dark theme doesn’t look so good on my site, it might be my plugins breaking it.
_ck_
Thanks. They’re still in the alpha phase right now though. I’m hoping to have the beta releases out either later this week or sometime next week.
I haven’t really tested with many plugins. I’m trying to get the alpha testers to take care of this for me though.