How to install bbPress with any theme

Step 1 – install

Dashboard -> Left menus -> Plugins -> Add new

Put bbPress in search  and  it was the first result ( Author should be ‘The bbPress Community’ )

Clicked install plugin and activated.

Step 2 – membership setup

Dashboard -> Left menu -> Settings -> General and set Membership to ‘Anyone can register’ & New User Default Role to ‘Forum Participant’

Step 3 – create registration page

I created a page called Forum registration and added a shortcode I found on the bbPress.org site.

Here is the link to all of the shortcodes http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-20-shortcodes

Step 4 – create login page

Created a page called Forum Login and added a shortcode for logon and one for lost password

Step 5 – add new pages to menu

Then put those pages under the forum menu.

To get the forum listing address I used as the top menu item go here

Dashboard -> Left menus -> Settings -> Forums

and in the setting there is a heading called ‘Archive slugs’ and the first entry is what you add to your domain name with a / in between.

For example my slug is bbp so the link to the forum listing is http://wphow.org/bbp

If you are not sure how to create a custom menu item watch the video on post how to use the WordPress 3.0 menu system . Custom menu items are mentions at the 1 minute mark of the video.

Step 6 – resave forum settings

I also had to go to Dashboard -> Left menus -> Settings -> Forums and just do a ‘Save changes’ as there can be a glitch sometimes (which I had) and users can’t post and this clears it.

Step 7 – create forums

Created a few new forums

Dashboard -> Left menus -> Settings -> Forums -> New forum

and put links to them in the dropdown menu under forum. The forums can be created as menu links straight from

Dashboard -> Left menus -> Appearance menus if your theme supports the menu system introduced in vers 3.0 of WordPres

Step 8 – create welcome message with rego and login links

I then created a forum entry with a welcome and links to those registration and login pages.

http://wphow.org/bbp/topic/welcome/

Step 9 – redirect directly to forums after login

I installed this plugin to redirect after someone logs in back to the forum listing.
Login redirect

Link to the free plugin: http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/login-redirect

To setup up the redirect you need to go to Settings -> General and right at the bottom you put the link to the main forum page

Feedback & Questions

If you have any questions please feel free to add a comment or even better use the forum where it will be easier to find later and may help more people.

http://wphow.org/bbp/