Unable to install bbpress themes

Question

I am having an issue with a wordpress and a bbpress plugin. I need to install a bbpress theme, but I can't seem to have them show up in admin, although I put it in the right directory. I have also tried with other themes, same result.

Answer 1

This is a bit hacky, but I was able to theme bbpress by building a child theme. By making a child theme instead of altering the plugin theme directly, you will make sure that your style changes won’t be overwritten if and when you update the plugin.

1. Start by copying the bbpress theme out of the plugin folder (I started working off the bbp-twentyten theme), and pasting it into the Wordpress themes folder. Rename it with whatever you want your new bbpress theme to be called. Go into themes > your child theme's name > style.css and add this in the header:

   @import url('../ the name of your parent theme /style.css');

   • Theme Name: Name of your Child theme
   • Description: Description of child theme.
   • Author: Your name
   • Template: The name of your parent theme

2. Go in to the appearance > theme area of your Wordpress dashboard and see if your new theme appears. If it does, install it.

   Your site should look exactly like it did before. What happens is that @import url allows the theme to pull all the styles from the parent theme, which you can then override without messing up the original.

3. Now edit the style.css file in themes > your-child-theme. Just be aware that if you make a change that doesn’t seem to load, you may need to add an !important to the style.