For now, I have disabled BuddyPress group forums on this site and and I am now using bbPress forum (themed with bbPress 2010 ).

See main menu nav link above on navbar-‘Forum (bbPress) public’.

For some reason I could not seem to run BuddyPress group forums and bbPress sitewide forums together on this blog.

This is apparently possible to do but I have not managed yet to get it working so for the present I am using bbPress forums on site here. I may later retry running BuddyPress group forums & or try again to run both BP & bbPress forums together partly for curiousity! I will see what more experience I can gain from running a WordPress integrated bbPress forum here on my blog. There are many issues to deal with eg site/forum registrations, controlling forums (moderating), controlling spammers etc etc. There are some plugins for bbPress that can help with this and others that are out of date and no longer supported. Of course there is also the option to code theme templates (eg functions.php etc) directly and this is often needed when converting a WordPress theme to accept bbPress or BuddyPress.

In fact the process of using bbPress TwentyTen forum style has been interesting. First I made a child theme of my BuddyPress enabled anIMass WordPress theme and then I added bbPress 2010 files to this and have done code edits on the files to fit to anIMass theme but still retaining the general 2010 bbPress style! This seems to be working alright.

I did hit an early problem in that the bbPress links on my forum page were not working propely and led to a completely empty/blank unstyled page. I put this down to the slug link still having an issue with BuddyPress as the link was/forum. I changed the bbPress archive slug (via dashboard bbPress settings) to /forums_bbp and when I made a new forum page the links on the page then/now work properly.

I also have an idea to see if I can somehow add another style of bbPress forum to this blog (Kakumei theme) but this may just not be possible or even necessary!

So I am making progress with BuddyPress and bbPress and time will tell how much of a success they become in my blogging on my various sites! There certainly is a steep learning curve to start using these if you are not using default BuddyPress or bbPress enabled themes and integrating them with WordPress is perhaps not as easy/simple as it could be. More and better documentation on the web in general and at WordPress.org/ BuddyPress.org and bbPress.org would be helpful. I have seen several interesting posts on this (eg link:Tomek on kott.fm bbPress styling-link and link: Diversions DCavins Guitars) and on a few other sites too showing that many othersare trying out BuddyPress and bbPress forums. All in all I would say it would have been simpler for me to add a php forum (eg phpbb/vBulletin/Tinybb, or use other WP forum plugin such as Vanilla or simpleforum) to my site but I have wanted to gain experience with BuddyPress and bbPress so I persist with them!

What is your experience of using BuddyPress and or bbPress forums?