Just to start, thank you for letting me take part in the Alpha. So far I have started digging through all the options, setup and general customization of the forum it's self. Everything has been smooth so far, until I decided to test the overall display of the forum. It seems to work just fine with the sidebar attached in the twenty ten theme, but it doesn't seem to want to spread out across the theme while using a single page layout with no sidebar. Not really sure what's stopping it right now, but I will dig further into that later.

Further to that, I decided to also test this alpha on my current theme arras theme. That really didn't go so well, it seems to have lumped the whole forum above the design in full screen.

Hopefully this is of some use, but it's the first thing I've run into.

first, as to twentyten…  its a stupid theme design, imho… I assume you are trying to use the full width template…  in the wp devs opinion, that just means you want no sidebar… so they center the forum and add white space on the side… the content area is the same…  I even wrote a trac ticket on it and it was summarily dismissed as wrong…  so you need to take that up with the wp devs…   or do like we do… and edit the css file and make the fullwidth (single column no sidebar) actually use 100% of the available space…

as to Arras, interesting… it is one of those quirky themes that does odd things with the wp loop…  do you have a screenshot of whats going on??  or a link if its actually web accessible…

In 5.0, we no longer 'build up' our output and output it all at once at the end… instead we incrementally output it as we go…  this could cause issues with folks hanging on or doing strange things with the wp the_content() filter… thought we had it sorted, but we cant possible try all themes…

what do you have for the multiple and loop options on forum – wp integration – page and permalink…

welcome to the alpha!

Sorry it took me a while to reply, had to vanish. Anyhow, here is a screenshot:

I have messed around with the WP Integration settings, it seems to have produced some rather interseting results where it’s placing the forum above the header like in the image, and also within the content area which I’m guessing is the loop of the content. All I have turned on option wise is “Limit Forum Display to Within WP Loop:” and “Allow Multiple Loading of Forum Content:”, I’ve tried to alternate the options but it still produces the same results. I don’t have the javascript libs turned on though obviously as I don’t have anything for it to load.

I know Arras is one hell of a funny system. It’s rather fun to play around with, but it has a really weird structure. if you need me to provide any code snippets I can.

what version of arras are you using???  I just downloaded v1.5.0.1 from their site and it comes out just fine…  stock out of the barrel… no settings changes or anything…

that said, the about author is below the forum but that is just theme template file issue…  really should have a custom wp page and not show the author info…

I’m obviously not having much luck with this. I just completely wiped out everything on my local server, started a fresh and installed arras 1.5.0.1 and wordpress 1.3.4. Setup everything as usual, checked the page and it’s doing the same thing all over again which is a little odd.

Something I did notice while the install was creating the files for the form it started to stumble the install. It was getting stuck on the avatar folders. So I had to delete the install and do another with those files already created. I’m not sure if it’s just my general setup but I’m running php 5.3.5 and MySQL 5.5.9 on Apache 2.0.64. I can’t really see this causing this sort of problem though. I will have to dig around and see what could be causing a possible conflict. As of right now though I’m a little stumped.

I decided I would try a live test of the forum on my server, it seems I'm still getting the same issue with the forum appearing above the header. http://fizzmatix.com/bunker/forum. I can provide some log in details if needed as this is only a test site.

well, this is why we alpha…

so do you have other plugins active??  It looks like something else is latching on to the_content() improperly and displaying the forum stuff… which is why you essentially get two displays of the forum…  since test site, can you temp deactivate other plugins and see if that helps?

we have a new loop detection algorithm we want to try, but havent implemented it yet…  the above would be good info…

since I dont see that with a stock arras theme install, I am wondering about other plugins… or perhaps what arras options have you set different from the default?  yes, sending me and yellow swordfish a login account with wp admn rights and sp admin rights might be beneficial… I could at least compare arras theme settings…

but do please try disabling other plugins and see what happens…

There are no other plugin-in's installed. It's just a bare bones arras fresh install and a fresh install of wordpress 3.1.4.

you were going to send andy and I a test account?

only difference I can see is that I am running wp 3.2 RC 4…  and I have groups and forums defined – which shouldnt matter… and its fresh download of arras theme last night…

did you switch the page template??  you arent getting a sidebar…

I did set it up to use a page template so the sidebar vanished. I've passed on the log-in details to that site so you can do what you need to alter it. There should be enough permissions so you can alter anything using the wp-admin editor as well. I've played around with a few options locally but still no luck. I've had a look through the core code for arras and nothing looks out of place to me, but there has to be something going on for it to call the forum out in two places. I do have alternative means of contact if you need it also. I use msn and aim on a regular basis so if you need me, just let me know.

looking at it now…

btw. everything is working fine with the wp twentyten theme… so you can use that if you want to play around… while we sort this arras issue…

Mr Papa said:

btw. everything is working fine with the wp twentyten theme… so you can use that if you want to play around… while we sort this arras issue…

On my local install i'm going to switch to twenty ten and get to work on some stuff. Hopefully this weird issue that's appeared is just a local issue to these thing, but if not hopefully it's something common that's an easy fix that won't show again, including other themes.

it has to do with arras grabbing all the post content in the wp head tags… ideally, the_content() or get_the_content() would only be called from within the loop not in the header… in fact the wp docs explicitly say it must be used within the loop… so in this case arras added another wp loop in the head tags… argh…

I have a fix in place but want to test and research a bit more…

Well if it's a fairly simple hack, let me know whenever you have finished the testing. My overall version of arras I used is hacked to pieces. I'm really only using it's core functions now, the rest of it has either been stripped away, destroyed or altered to fit my needs. But obviously if other themes are doing the same thing if you hack is a workaround for those also as you said it needs to be tested to cover other possible annoyances. I don't really have any issues writing hacks into themes but others might, then again I've spent more time altering layouts and using them more for core functions than anything else.