[Thomas]

This problem has been around a long time and still not many good solutions:

Template hierarchy in detail

Besides manually creating template files for every piece of bbPress, which most website owners are not able to do

[Arthur]

How do I get bbpress pages to use a specific page template in WordPress?

Force bbPress to use different template then page.php

You can try creating bbpress.php or just forum.php for just the forum index page, but then there is no content/loop loaded for the forum index

[Doris]

sounds like most users just want bbpress forums to use “no sidebar” page template, and they have a page called “Forum” but page-forum.php does not work and you can’t also change the page template inside the post editor window either, this is because bbPress does not consider that to be a page… it is archives.

so you can also use archive-forum.php instead of forum.php

[Ann]

I tried it.

forum.php did not work, but archive-forum.php did work

ONLY for the forum index page.

[Doris]

bbpress documentation is really bad and outdated btw….

[Susan]

If you don’t want to create a fully custom template for the forum index (or topics etc) and just want to use the WordPress post editor to manage the forum index contents, I don’t think there is a solution because bbPress does not consider that to be a page. If you don’t have any bbPress template files, you can trick bbPress by create a page called /forum/ or /forums/ depending on your bbPress settings, and then edit the loop with the post editor. And because of WordPress loading order, it will load the page first, and show that to users, so it is kind of skipping the bbPress loading order which would otherwise hit index.php I believe.

However you can’t choose the page template in this method. bbPress will force-load the layout of index.php or page.php regardless of your /forum/ page template settings. So ironically it will display the loop content, but ignore the chosen template.

[Robert]

Pretty much you would need to have a template like forum.php and then instead of having a normal loop like:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
    <?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

you have to call the loop of the specific page you want to use, eg. /forum/ or whatever.

$id=47;
$post = get_page($id);
$content = apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content);
echo $content;

see https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/12168/152624

[Frances]

but still requires custom hardcode yeah?

[Gloria]

Okay folks:

https://github.com/littlebizzy/hovercraft/blob/master/archive-forum.php

HoverCraft has a solution for this now.

Simply make sure you have a page with the slug “forum” a.k.a. /forum/ and the theme will automatically use the title and post content for the bbPress forum index. We might add the option later to choose the page you want to use in the Customizer, but for now it seems logical that most sites will use /forum/ for the bbPress index.

[Evelyn]

https://www.quora.com/Which-free-WordPress-themes-support-bbPress-forums

[Author]

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