Customizing
There are many ways to customize your bbPress by styling or just adding extra functionality to your site, so please follow along to learn how to customize your bbPress forums.
Installing Plugins
bbPress comes with many plugins to extend the functionality of your bbPress forums. Whether you want better support forum capabilities or just enhancing the community experience with voting or quoting. You may search through a plethora of bbPress plugins in the plugins section on bbpress.org or on wordpress.org.
Develop a Plugin
You may also decide create a custom bbPress plugin for your bbPress forums, so hopefully this list of links will help you do so.
- Writing a Plugin
- Plugin API
- add_meta_box
- Using Actions and add_action
- Using Filters and add_filter
- List of Hooks
- List of Filters
You could also fork or contribute to any existing bbPress plugins.
Installing Themes
While bbPress can work with most themes and might require a little work for some to do so. When installing themes it is suggested that you find a WordPress theme with bbPress support.
Develop a Theme
Whether creating a child theme or your own custom theme for bbPress, creating a theme will give you the most flexibility to customize bbPress how you want it.
- Creating a Child Theme and Child Themes and functions files explained
- Theme Development
- Theme Compatibility
- Modifying the Main bbPress template
- Amending Templates
- bbPress Conditional Tags
Additional Steps to Customize
Adding Code Snippets
Code snippets are usually small bits of code that can be used to tweak your site or add small but neat features to your bbPress site. These snippets need to be placed in your child theme’s functions.php file or in a functionality plugin.
There is a section of user submitted code snippets that should help add some basic features or tweaks to your bbPress site.
The bbPress forums offer up many code snippets from the community to help you add any other kinds of extra functionality to your bbPress site. So you may want to do a search in the forums and try to find what you are looking for.
Many bbPress code snippets may be posted in many code pasting sites such as Github’s Gist or Pastebin , so these sites might be worth a look.
Styling your Forums
You may want to modify the way bbPress looks, well css is the way to go! It is recommended to copy the bbpress.css file from the bbPress plugin and place this in your child theme in a folder called “css”, or to at least install a custom css plugin to place small css snippets into. Hopefully these other links listed will help you to style your forums better.
