Integrating bbPress and WordPress

On my other website simply His, I decided to add a private forum. Since I’m so totally in love with WordPress, I decided to try out bbPress — made by the same techie people :) Here are some notes for a few little problems I ran into while installing. For the most part it was as painless as installing WordPress.

When you want to run a program from a subdirectory under the WordPress directory, the subdirectory may give you a 404 error or similar. I had tried to access the forums and could get to the first page, but anything past that returned me to my blog with a 404 error page. Here’s what I had to do to get it to show up correctly.

In my main WordPress directory, I had to edit the .htaccess file (which you can do with a text editor like Notepad or HTML Editor):

# These are the standard WordPress Rules
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/forums(.*)$
 RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

In this case, I had to add the fourth line above. You’ll need to change the ^/forums(.*)$ to reference whatever directory you put there. Like if you have photo gallery software running in /gallery — you’d put ^/gallery(.*)$ instead of the forums. This will tell WordPress to allow access to the directory below it. You’re still not done.

In the forums directory, I had to add an .htaccess file. In the bbPress directions, it lists this as the code to put in that file:

Options +MultiViews

You’ll just have to try this. If it doesn’t work, then you need to access the /bb-admin/rewrite-rules.php file to get the needed lines you’ll put in the .htaccess file. When I accessed this file, it gave me the following lines:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /forums/
RewriteRule ^forum/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /forums/forum.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^forum/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/forum.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^topic/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /forums/topic.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^topic/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/topic.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^tags/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /forums/tags.php?tag=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^tags/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/tags.php?tag=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^tags/?$ /forums/tags.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /forums/profile.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /forums/profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2&page=$3 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/profile.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^view/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /forums/view.php?view=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^view/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/view.php?view=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/?$ /forums/rss.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/forum/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/rss.php?forum=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/topic/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/rss.php?topic=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/tags/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/rss.php?tag=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/profile/([^/]+)/?$ /forums/rss.php?profile=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

Hopefully this will help you to avoid the same problems.

When upgrades just don’t go like they should

I had the privilege of redoing Heather @ Desperately Seeking Sanity’s blog yesterday. She loved the theme but wanted 3 columns instead of two — not to mention widgets. I didn’t realize she was still running WordPress 2.1 — the latest being 2.3.1.

I upgraded her to 2.3.1 which was not difficult — at least upgrading the WordPress files were not difficult. The difficult part were all the Plugins she’d loaded before. Let me make a big recommendation to all of you out there who may be struggling with WordPress upgrade:

  1. Uninstall ALL of the Plugins.
  2. Upgrade WordPress.
  3. Find updated versions of ALL Plugins.
  4. Install new versions of Plugins one at a time.
  5. Check to see that everything works after adding each one.

Heather told me this morning her Uploads area in her Write Post area wasn’t showing up. Instead there was a preview window showing a 404 error page. The problem? Her Flickr Plugin. She didn’t have the latest. So please, please, please, even if you think they should work — check to make sure you have the latest and the greatest. You may not be able to go through your Admin panel and Plugins to get there either. The Plugin developer could have linked to a project page that is applicable to that version — not the latest one. If you have doubts, please check the WordPress Plugins Directory for either a newer version or a different/better version of what you’re looking for.

Send me your WordPress Questions

I have decided to write an ebook about WordPress. It seems that everyone I discuss WordPress with always has questions or problems they are trying to solve and are confused with the the information they find online. I’ve been told I explain things well, and I do know WordPress pretty well. There is quite a lot of stuff I know though and I’m not sure where to start. That’s where I need your help. What are your pressing questions? What are some of the things you’ve spent hours and hours trying to figure out? Leave me a comment here or if you’d rather, send me an email at lisab [at] opensourcemaven [dot] com. When you do I’ll add your name in the pot for winning a free copy of the finished ebook. I’ll do one better than that — for every question you send me, I’ll give you one entry — even if I get the same questions from a bunch of people.

Customizing Your WordPress Theme Footer Using Dynamic Sidebars

I’m so excited! I just can’t hide it! {Imagine Pointer Sisters singing}

Lorelle on WordPress wrote “Customizing Your WordPress Theme Footer” back on September 30th. She gave some great examples on how to customize and use the footer of your theme for more than just a basic link back to WordPress. I thought of a different way and I’ve just figured out all the code you’d need to add to give you 2 columns at the bottom (actually outside of your technical footer div). I’ve done it here, so if you scroll to the bottom, you will see a red border on the left and a green border on the right. Here’s the code and references to the files you add them to for the K2 theme. You may be able to use this on other themes as well, but K2 is what I’m using here.

Continue reading ‘Customizing Your WordPress Theme Footer Using Dynamic Sidebars’

Customize K2 Theme: Create Custom Style Sheet and Fixing Header Size

For simply His I already had a header design that was taller than the template would display. I created a custom style sheet to fix the header size. I’ll be adding to this custom style sheet to give the blog a more personal touch.

Continue reading ‘Customize K2 Theme: Create Custom Style Sheet and Fixing Header Size’

Customize K2 Theme: Downloading, Installing, and Preferences

For my WordPress blog, simply His, I decided to build upon the theme K2. The version I just download and installed is the Release Candidate 2. This is the latest as of October 5, 2007. You should always check their site [ getk2.com ] to make sure you get the latest version.

Continue reading ‘Customize K2 Theme: Downloading, Installing, and Preferences’

Open Source Maven — Lives!

I’m bringing Open Source Maven back to life. I’ve decided this is the place where I’m going to put all my directions to do techie things. Most of this stuff is probably going to be about WordPress, but really anything open source, free or no-money-outta-my-pocket will be posted here. If you have any questions, please send them along — either in comments or in email. I’m a lot better at answering specific how-to questions than coming up with content off the top of my head.

Oh, and I’m re-working one of my other blogs — simply His. I’ll be detailing here what I do over there. Hopefully you’ll find it interesting :)

Open Source Project Management

Open Workbench is an open source desktop application for project scheduling. It is a very powerful alternative to Microsoft Project.

Hat tip — meryl’s notes :: September 2007

How Do I FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. You need an FTP client (software) running on your computer to connect to your web server. I prefer FileZilla.

Continue reading ‘How Do I FTP?’

What do I do with a .zip file?

If you are running Windows XP (or a later version of Windows operating system), you can easily unzip the file. A .zip file contains several other files compressed into a single file for easier distribution.

Continue reading ‘What do I do with a .zip file?’




Behind Open Source Maven

Lisa Boyd

I am Lisa Boyd, the Open Source Maven. I am polishing some technical writer skills by blogging here about all things open source and/or free, but mainly WordPress. WordPress ROCKS!


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