bbPress is our favorite forum software, simply because of how well it integrates within WordPress. bbPress appears to be a bit outdated, however there are ways you can improve the appearance of the plugin within your theme.
In traditional forum structure, the forum category appears at the top and below are the forums.
Changing bbPress Forums Index
bbPress has support for forum categories out of the box and it’s forums can be arranged in a hierarchical structure.
Therefore, all that needs to be changed is the loop of the forums index. This is exactly what we have done in the below code.
This file can be uploaded to the root directory of your child theme. It can also be uploaded to your primary theme (as well as in a bbPress/forum specific folder).
You can download the loop-forums.php file by going to our GitHub or just by copying and pasting the below code into your own loop-forums.php
https://gist.github.com/Volnus/85075f7455bf46723603fd2c09c3d401
To explain the logic behind the code, you need to set a forum category. Then you need to have the forums set as children of that category. In the event that you do not do this, the default category will be placed and then it will place the rest of the forums under that.
Give it a try on your own website and let us know what you think!
Wonderful. Works exactly what is says. Why haven’t you created a plugin for it. I have incorporated this feature on my website https://hostmayo.com/blog/forums/
It’s on my list of things to do, I am in the middle of rebuilding this website to be more modern, and with it will come new features, a forum, an easier format to find my videos & guides and a section of various plugins that I will write.
However, part of the reason this wasn’t a plugin is the way that bbPress templating works but I will look into it more in the future and see if I can add this as a plugin as well!
Good to hear that….once you made a plugin do update me…would love to try that.
Notice: Undefined variable: bbp_forums_noheader in /var/www/html/xxxxx/wp-content/themes/xxxxx/bbpress/loop-forums.php on line 17
My fix:
if (bbp_is_forum_category() OR !isset($bbp_forums_noheader))
Good catch, this solution assumes your theme is using the default bbPress template/style however some themes modify this, therefore, you will have to take that into account.
I am not sure if this may be due for an update, but it’s certainly not working for me
Disregard. My apologies. I got this working. I ended up having this file ALL of the place. Using a custom theme, and I never realized that another extension had a copy of the template files.
Glad to see you got it working. Let me know if you have any future issues with it!