Installing themes, skins your site to look how you want and apply specific theme functionality for much more customization options for your site.

Finding Themes

Whenever you are searching for themes to install for your bbPress forums, specifically you look for WordPress themes with bbPress support. This means themes that work flawlessly with bbPress forums without issues and would not require users to edit any template files. This is strongly recommended if you want the bbPress forum to look better than the default styles and if you do not want to worry about editing any files.

To find a bbPress supported theme, you would need to look in the WordPress theme repository and enter “bbpress” then decide the theme you want from there..

While there are some bbPress supported themes listed, there might be themes that may not have bbPress support, by default your current unsupported theme is using bbPress’s theme compatibility. So while you may have found a theme you like but it doesn’t have bbPress support, your theme should still work because of bbPress’s theme compatibility, but may require a little work to work flawlessly without coming across some common theme issues. Some themes do work great without any need adjustments or modifications to work, so it is different every theme. Contact your theme author first to see if they would consider adding bbPress support to their theme, or if they have a child theme for you to use that adds bbPress support for their theme. If you need any additional help fixing any issues with theme compatibility, make sure to post a topic in the support forums.

Installing Themes

After you have found the theme you want to install, with it either being bbPress supported or you have decided to rely on bbPress’s theme compatibility, installing is an easy process.

If your theme requires a specific installation and provides instructions, be sure to read and follow those instructions.

To install a theme:

• Login into your WordPress backend
• Go to Appearance > Themes and hit the Add New button toward the top
• Now in the themes search bar enter the name of the theme and hit enter to search for it
• Hit the Install button on the theme that you searched for
• Then click the Activate link to make this theme your current theme used for your site

bbPress 2.x has built-in theme support. All required elements such as front-end editing are included. This means that all functionality will work, even when a theme has no specific bbPress templates or code included with it.

All bbPress compat can be overridden using a theme or another plugin. Check bbp-theme-compat template wrappers for what a normal theme should include.

To customize bbPress:

The directory “wp-content/plugins/bbpress/templates/default/” contains the directories “bbpress”, “css”, “extras”, and “js”, and the file “bbpress-functions.php”.

• The “bbpress” directory contains template parts. Copy any of them into a directory named “bbpress” in your themes root, so it looks like: /wp-content/themes/%your-theme%/bbpress/
• The “extras” directory contains optional root level page templates, to make life a little easier when customizing; copy any you want to use or modify into the root of your theme. eg. /wp-content/themes/%your-theme%/
• The “css” directory contains style sheets that work with the default markup. Copy any you want to modify into a directory named “css” in your theme’s root. eg. /wp-content/themes/%your-theme%/css/
• Basically, you could copy the entire ‘bbpress’ and ‘css’ directories out of bbPress’s default template directory, and into your theme, and bbPress will use the ones located inside your theme instead. Pretty neat, eh?

bbPress comes built in with user Roles that give the website owner the ability to tailor user access to their website. This page details the bbPress capabilities that each role has.

You manage bbPress users roles in the same way you manage WordPress user roles. (/wp-admin/users.php)

Under the hood details of the roles and capabilities introduced with bbPress 2.2 can be read here.
(bbPress user Roles can be found in /includes/core/capabilities.php)

For more general information on WordPress Roles and Capabilities, refer to the guide in the WordPress Codex.

For advanced editing of bbPress User Roles checkout @JJJ‘s plugin by Advanced user capability editing for bbPress.

Summary of Roles

The default bbPress Roles are:

• Keymaster – Can create, edit and delete other users’ forums, topics and replies. Can manage Tags, and moderate a forum with the moderation tools. Has access to global forum settings, tools, and importer.
• Moderator – Can create and edit forums. Can create, edit and delete other users’ topics and replies. Can manage Tags, and moderate a forum with the moderation tools.
• Participant – Can create and edit their own topics and replies.
• Spectator – Can only read topics and replies.
• Blocked – All capabilities are explicitly blocked.

For more information: bbPress User Roles and Capabilities

This area defines the privileges and restrictions for the bbPress forums.

Disallow editing after

Set this to the time (in number of minutes) to limit post editing. Once the time limit has been reached the forum post no longer be available for editing to forum participants. Administrators and bbPress Moderators can override this setting at any time.

Throttle posting every

Set this to the minimum time (in seconds) between posting new replies in bbPress forums. This is useful to help stop spamming or other attempts to interrupt the normal flow of the forum.

Anonymous posting

Any site visitor can post a new topic or reply without the need of logging into your site. They will still be required to enter a name and email to post, but will not be required to create a username or password and will not be shown in the list of WordPress Users.

Auto Role

Select the default role for bbPress forum members to be assigned, the roles are Keymaster, Moderator, Participant (Default), Spectator and Blocked. For full details of the permissions assigned by these roles please User Roles and Capabilities.

Forum Features

Revisions

WordPress stores a new version of posts each time a draft is saved or a post is edited and republished. Enable or disable this for bbPress topics and replies here. To learn more about revisions, check the WordPress codex article on Revision Management.

Favorites

Forum participants can “favorite” any topic. These topics are available later for review from the participant’s forum profile. Additionally a custom RSS feed is available allowing participants to stay up to date on topics that are important to them.

Subscriptions

Forum participants can elect to subscribe to a forum or topic. They will be notified when a new topic is created in a subscribed forum or a new reply is posted to a subscribed topic. Subscribed forums and topics will appear on their forum user profile.

Topic Tags

This will disable topic tags site wide and will no longer show topic tags associated with each topic or the topic tag input form.

For more information: Forum User Settings

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