cscolvin

@kanjipad, I agree.

If you decide to look for other options, Drupal 7 and 8 are hard to beat. Inside of three days I am half through configuring a site with a knowledgebase, multi-user blogs, forums, email, articles, pages, messaging, chat, and a Book feature that indexes content to form books. All mobile compatible. With a single integrated (not bridged) registration and login.

If I were only creating a blog like my WordPress blog, which I paid $99 for the year already, I could have built a custom Drupal blog in a few hours with a blog theme with a choice of many very nice ones for free. Configuration is simple. Tons of easily installed modules, plugins and extensions for customization.

I wish you luck with your WordPress site though.

~Catherine

@lionel: What a trollish remark.

Do you think I would post if I didn’t care?

I care about Ipage shoving WordPress down my throat when there are more appropriate options to serve specific and repeatedly well-stated purposes. Thankfully I discovered Drupal, Adaptive Themes and Panels Everywhere.

I care about being ignored by WordPress Concierge after I paid $99 for 3 hours of discussion.

I care about Endurance International buying hosting services then paying attention to those as if they are extra socks they don’t need. I am grateful to have moved to a real hosting service with excellent tech support that can’t be bought by Endurance International.

I care about losing over a week to scripted responses, abundant skill-related training issues and ‘we can’t do that’.

i care about the work I do and 270+ people waiting on completion of this project so they can do what they do best.

I’ve moved on, but perhaps your crowd will continue to invite more discussion here for the public to review. I happen to care enough to keep coming back here to further elaborate.

My point is trying to use BBPress and themes as things are, is like working with discombobulated ‘stuff’ a programmer put together for end users without meaningful end user input. I have no intention of paying to be choked by someone else’s ideas, or their personal or professional limitations.

I also would not trust a total stranger to create something important for me. Maybe if I didn’t care about limitations and was too lazy to learn to code, and if I only needed a simple receptionist type site… maybe.

It’s ok if coders build things for themselves, hope it works out for someone else and maybe their creation can be used by WordPress; hopefully for a paycheck at some point. And WordPress is milking that for all its worth. Just another extremity of mega-monopolies I don’t care to support.

Now I feel the purpose of this entire discussion was simply to get me to pay a WordPress coder. No thank you. I’m done here.

First, www.ads-software.com makes it difficult to find themes without endlessly going through page after page. I would find a theme that looked like a good fit. Try it. Find snags. Start over. Probably for that reason I did not get to the three themes you linked above to experiment with, although they look like good options at a glance. Not having used them, I cannot say more.

I don’t recall which difficulties were with BBPress or a theme. A few times I could not tell if one was interfering with the other. There would be a place to change something, but it wouldn’t appear correctly. Ipage tech support said it was my browser and everything would work great if I used Chrome. My puter is an old D630 Latitude and still runs great on WXP. It is maxed and cooks along quite well, but Chrome would break its little legs. When I gave chrome a chance, everything froze repeatedly, making it necessary to reboot before anything else would function. I also remember when developers struggled with only a few browsers to achieve compatibility, but the
present is what it is.

I also do not know what BBPress’ intended purpose is. With that in mind, I am also speaking as someone who remembers (almost 20 years ago) being able to set up what I need now using htm with nested tables, in a day or less without CSS. Simple things I used to have total control over, is the core of my current frustration.

Generally, what I remember being unaccommodating as a first time user, is inability to:

* position sidebars where I need them (with a few themes, it was anyone’s guess how a menu, sidebar or header would interact… a sidebar or menu would not appear at all, other times one squished the other)

* reasonably resize sidebar and header height and width (now using Black Sea from Theme Forest which at least allows setting a custom header size, though Google fonts stink)

* switch between basic web/mobile compatible fonts and font colors for text and links (shouldn’t a simple color match selector be a basic feature?)

* consistently link external pages to categories (seems to change with each theme… one consistent option to link an external URL in categories for menus and sidebars would surely minimize confusion and themes could focus more on artistic creativity)

Again, I don’t know what BBPress is supposed to do. However, since BBPress appears to be the backbone themes rely on, it seems BBPress should consistently have the proprietary upper hand. Using the ‘BBPress as a skeleton’ metaphor, a theme can add artistry but should not be allowed to interfere with the BBPress structure. Maybe that is how it is, and I have BBPress functionality confused with theme features? In any case, it was not definitively clear which was which.

As a first time end user, whether it be BBPress or theme related, consistent flexibility is what I am not experiencing.

I don’t know if any of this input helps, or if I joined the majority of unreasonable users who expect too much. Mostly I resent being cornered into using applications that don’t allow individual customization without learning a ton of coding. Currently I simply do not have time to relearn coding, and I imagine many users would rather not become coders in order to share their work and ideas.

Rethinking all of this in writing released a bit of steam. Thank you for asking and listening.

~Catherine

@robkk, funny thing about that. Ipage referred me to WP Essentials Concierge for help with BBPress. I assume because WP Essentials charges $99 per month for 3 hours of phone support plus email. But even for that price, they couldn’t be bothered.

I had no problem installing BBPress. But by itself it would not serve my purpose. When choosing a theme I only looked at those that stated they are BBPress compatible.

I don’t expect BBpress to be compatible with other applications, rather the other way around. However, how WordPress presents BBPress is entirely misleading. Alone BBPress is insufficient. Using it with supposedly compatible themes, invited a bucket load of headaches no one needs.

It’s been about a week since I used it and don’t remember exact problems now. Mainly I recall some widgets simply did not work. And lack of flexibility in both BBPress and various themes, boxes in creativity. Most of the themes don’t even allow controlling fonts or individual colors.

I don’t mind paying. In fact I ended up paying for a theme that is loaded with what should be standard in all themes. Even so, the one I paid for lacks certain features that should be commonly available.

Back to BBPress though. If a sitebuilder is going to make all the claims BBPress does, there needs to be more flexibility built into it. It should not be a struggle to use. It should not require coding at all. It should provide a solid skeleton of sorts, that themes can easily add to.

Thank you for offering to help. Last week it might have made a difference. Unfortunately, Ipage was intent on selling WP Essentials Concierge.

Thank you, nonetheless.

@kanjipad, thank you for responding. I would have preferred using WordPress/BBPress, but moved on to phpBB. It has been nearly a week. After much experimentation, I gave up and do not remember which issues occurred with each theme that was tried. I had not expected a response here or I would have kept notes to share.

@robkk, I need to keep things simple. In another lifetime, I enjoyed coding, however now there is no time to relearn to catch up. Neither do I expect free software to provide free support or any support, but I do expect public claims by the host to be accurate across the board.

As for the comment, yes. That is exactly what what was said to me during more than one phone call to Ipage when I mentioned problems with BBPress. In fact, since you can see my notes, you will notice the attempt to cancel my Ipage account, at which time a billing supervisor encouraged me to use the WP Essentials Concierge. I agreed with reservations. The concierge was supposed to send me an email first thing last Monday morning, but did not until about 5:30 Monday evening. There is more to all this… essentially a massive chain of miscommunications, but that was the last straw. That is how phpBB came to replace BBPress and why I took time to make the initial comment.

I have commented similarly about any application that does not work as claimed. People should have an idea what they are up against prior to spending several days to get something functional (maybe) despite public claims by the host that it supports such software, which really only means they install it on a server. In other words, stating an application is supported by hardware is a fair claim, while alluding to other support definitionally and fairly assumed by unwitting users is fraudulent.