Creating pretty, search engine friendly permalinks in BBPress can be a challenging task sometimes. BBPress is a free forum hosting software from the makers of the famous WordPress. It’s very basic, but in integrates well and if you install proper plugins, it doesn’t even get much spam. Coming back to pretty permalinks in BBPress.
Pretty permalinks are search engine friendly URL, the kinds you get even in WordPress (http://blogname.com/post-name/ instead of http://blogname.com/index.php?p=1). In BBPress, you can go to the Admin section and then to Settings, and change the way your URLs should appear.
The problem is, sometimes it doesn’t work. Whenever you change the permalink structure in WordPress, it adds a few lines in you .htaccess file (it creates the file if the final doesn’t already exist).
Somehow this doesn’t happen if you change the permalink structure in BBPress in order to generate pretty URLs. In this case you can manually create a .htaccess file and upload it in the directory where you have installed BBPress. You will and only had to add a few lines in this file and you can obtain these lines by directing your browser to
http://yoursite.com/bb-folder/bb-admin/rewrite-rules.php
When I did this on my website I got the following code:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wforum/
RewriteRule ^forum/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /wforum/forum.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^forum/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/forum.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^topic/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /wforum/topic.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^topic/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/topic.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^tags/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /wforum/tags.php?tag=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^tags/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/tags.php?tag=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^tags/?$ /wforum/tags.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /wforum/profile.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /wforum/profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2&page=$3 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/profile.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/?$ /wforum/profile.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^view/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ /wforum/view.php?view=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^view/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/view.php?view=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/?$ /wforum/rss.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/topics/?$ /wforum/rss.php?topics=1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/forum/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/rss.php?forum=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/forum/([^/]+)/topics/?$ /wforum/rss.php?forum=$1&topics=1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/topic/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/rss.php?topic=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/tags/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/rss.php?tag=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/profile/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/rss.php?profile=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/view/([^/]+)/?$ /wforum/rss.php?view=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>
Copy it into your .htaccess file, upload it and your pretty permalink URLs should work in BBPress.
