I had another developer take a deeper look at the issue and this was his response: 

Now that I know you’re using SimplePress, I looked up the plugin and downloaded it. I did a search for  “the_title” I found it does filter that:

add_filter('the_title',    'sp_setup_page_title', 9999);

 

Then I looked at that function:

function

sp_setup_page_title($title) {

    

global $spGlobals, $spVars;

 

    

if (trim($title) == trim(SFPAGETITLE)) {

 

        

if (!empty($spGlobals['display']['pagetitle']['banner'])) return '';

        

if ($spGlobals['display']['pagetitle']['notitle']) return '';

 

        

$seo = array();

        

$seo = sp_get_option('sfseo');

        

$title = sp_setup_title($title, ' '.$seo['sfseo_sep'].' ');

        

$spVars['seotitle'] = $title;

    

}

    

return $title;

}

 

As you can see, it is filtering only on the Forum page title, and there are specific conditions where it returns an empty string.

While I haven’t tested this to confirm, I’m 99% sure this is the cause of your issue. 

Hope that helps!

I’ll try your advice and see if a custom link or that forum option makes any difference. ( but i’m pretty sure I checked them both in the past….I’ll double check.

Tried the forum option and custom link in the menus – no luck on either.

Not wishing to be rude but your developer is not really looking at that very closely and hasn’t bothered to take a more holistic view of what is going on there.

It DOES return an empty string (1) If you have the forums set to NOT display the page title ast all or (2) if you have the option set to display a graphical banner instead of the page title. I.e., in both instances the option tells us NOT to display the title.

Did you try either of my suggestions by the way?

I did try both of them – no luck. As far as the developer stuff – Yea i’m sure it’s much more complex than I realize…Just thought they might help target my particular issue, maybe even report a bug. In any event I did find a work-a-round that works for me…

What I did was changed the url of the forums page from mysite.com/forum > /forums – Then I was able to make my menu item “Forum” like I would like to.

It was kind of a trade off, since I feel that more attention would be paid to the menu item then 1 more letter in the url…

~Cheers

It is most odd – even unheard of – that the direct link in the menu did not work. That, I think, is a first and perhaps suggests that your menu is being constructed using different tools and functions to the ones we are used to.
Sorry to hear you have had to work around it but glad also that you have managed to.

No worries! These things happen – with so many combinations of plugins, themes and various other customizations, things like this are bound to happen from time to time

Oh how refreshing to hear someone say that!

So many just say – ‘but it’s all supposed to work – it’s WordPress!’

The number of times i have pointed out that with thousands of themes and thousands of plugins the likelihood of any two websites having exactly the same construction is just so unlikely…!