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1. mrhoratio
   

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   Hello everyone,

   I want to display a bbPress forum topic within The Loop in Wordpress. The idea is that it would appear as an excerpted blog entry like the others, but when you click the permalink, it would take you to the corresponding bbPress forum topic page where you can post comments.

   For example, it would be great if there was to query bbPress forum topics that are tagged with "front page", and display those forum posts together with blog posts within Wordpress in chronological order.

   The best scenario would be a little "Show in Wordpress Loop" checkbox that you can check next to individual forum topics in bbPress. That way you can select certain topics to link to on the Wordpress front page.

   Does anyone have suggestions on how to do this? Would this be possible with a plugin of some kind?

   Posted 4 years ago #
2. _ck_
   

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   Well it's technically possible to do but it might be easier to use bbSync to have entries created on either side so they appear within the regular database and can be searched, categorized, etc.

   This is a demo of the bbPress Signatures plugin!
   If you use my plugins, please considering donating to help continue their development.

   Posted 4 years ago #
3. mrhoratio
   

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   Hey _ck_, does bbSync work in both directions? I thought that it only made Wordpress posts into bbPress forum topics, but not the other way around. Are you saying that in bbSync, every time you make a forum topic it turns into a blog post as well?

   Posted 4 years ago #
4. _ck_
   

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   mrhoratio - 7 minutes ago  » 
   Hey _ck_, does bbSync work in both directions?

   I have to confess to never have used it but it's my understanding that it is indeed two-way. (The first paragraph on the plugin page says as much). There have been some reports of problems with it on 0.9.x but hopefully fel64 is ontop of it.

   Posted 4 years ago #
5. mrhoratio
   

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   Hey _ck_, I just checked out the plugin page. And it looks like comments/replies are bidirectional, but the posts themselves are not. I'm actually not looking to synchronize the bbPress forum topics with Wordpress blog posts in both directions--although it's a super cool feature. I'm mostly just trying to find a way to pull in a forum topic into Wordpress and link to it within The Loop. I just found a plugin that sortof gets close to this functionality called Latest Discussion It's able to bring in bbPress forum topics in Wordpress, but it lists it separately from The Loop. And I don't believe you can pick and choose wich forum topics to bring in.

   Perhaps there's a way to modify Latest Discussions to query select forum topics and somehow incorporate it into The Loop?

   Posted 4 years ago #
6. _ck_
   

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   WordPress loop functions won't work on bbPress data. So you'd have to write some code to mix in the latest discussions data inbetween the WordPress loop. I am not sure why they have to be mixed together or how you'd sort them (by date?) but a bbPress topic is not typically formatted like a WordPress post.

   In theory you could also use an RSS aggrigator to mix in the WordPress and bbPress topics. Since the RSS would have the same format for both, that would be a consistent loop.

   Posted 4 years ago #
7. mrhoratio
   

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   My reason for wanting to mix them together is that I'd like to essentially duplicate a Drupal feature which allows you to "promote" nodes to the front page. More specifically, let's imagine a Wordpress administrator and Forum moderator named Peggy. The scenario I was thinking of would be something like this:

   ---

   Peggy logs into Wordpress admin (or perhaps bbPress admin) for her blog, Supercool Things. She clicks the "Manage" tab to see a list of all bbPress forum topics. Next to each topic is a "Promote to Front Page" checkbox. Peggy sees that a user has just posted a forum topic about a new upcoming iPhone. Peggy thinks the topic deservs to be "promoted", so she checks the Promote to Front Page checkbox and hits "Save" to confirm.

   Next, Peggy goes to the SuperCool Things home page. She sees a list of blog posts in reverse chronological order. The first post is the iPhone forum topic that she just "promoted". She also sees the promoted forum topic in the blog's RSS feed as well as its Archives page.

   While on the front page of SuperCool things, Peggy notices a typo on the promoted forum topic, so she clicks its permalink. This takes her to the forum topic page in bbPress. Peggy edits the topic within bbPress, and the changes are automagically reflected on the front page as well.

   ---

   The RSS aggregator option is an interesting idea. I wonder how it would handle edits though, such as in the above the scenario. Will it automaticaly update in Wordpress after it's been mixed together?

   Posted 4 years ago #
8. _ck_
   

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   I've actually been brainstorming on a "promote to front page" plugin for bbPress but I never planned on WordPress loop integration. It would be more standalone but you could show the data from WordPress.

   But the aggregator would solve your problem because the links would always go to the appropriate program, ie. WordPress/bbPress for whatever item it was. The bonus is you could even mix in feeds from other sites or 3rd party software running on your own site (ie. Trac). Any changes would show new on the front page in realtime and you should even be able to offer a combined output RSS feed.

   Here is one (of many, many) such programs for WordPress:
   http://www.genoc.net/eter-rss
   and it's demo:
   http://www.genoc.net/eter-rss-demo/

   Posted 4 years ago #
9. mrhoratio
   

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   Hey _ck_, I love the RSS feed idea. I'll check Eter RSS out. I'm not totally sure how bbPress feeds work, but I'm assuming I'd need to create an RSS feed in bbPress that always contains every single forum topic, in order for changes to reflect in Wordpress realtime?

   From my understanding, RSS feeds generally include only the most recent subset of all posts. For example, a bbPress feed might only contain the last 30 recent forum topics. Let's assume I can get Wordpress to aggregate a bbPress feed and mix it into the loop. Does it mean that stories fall out of the Wordpress loop, when they disappear off the bbPress feed (because they are old, not because they are deleted from the forums) as well?

   So if we go back to our scenario: Ideally, Peggy could go to the front page of the blog and use the pagination links at the bottom to go back several pages and see posts from 2 months ago. On this page, Peggy would still be able to see "promoted" forum topics mixed in with blog posts from 2 months ago, even though the forum topic may have disappeared from the bbPress feed because it's old.

   I also wonder what the performance issues are with having a feed that contains every single topics.

   We seem so so close to a solution!

   Posted 4 years ago #
10. _ck_
    

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    You can get RSS feeds for almost any page in bbPress by putting `/feed/` after it. In fact the front page has two different feeds, one for topics and one for individual posts. You'll probably want the topics one.

    With some clever programming, even though the feeds might only contain the last 10-20 topics, you can make the front page tool cache them and therefore go back into the hundreds.

    Posted 4 years ago #

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