Great question. The short answer is that it depends on how the forum plugin stores its content.
How Loupe Search decides what it can search
Loupe Search indexes WordPress post types. It reacts to save_post and reads normal WordPress post objects, and the searchable set is whatever you pick in Settings (or add via a filter). So the rule is simple:
- If the forum content is a WordPress custom post type, it works.
- If it lives in the plugin’s own database tables, it can’t be indexed out of the box.
The two common forum plugins differ here
- bbPress stores forums, topics, and replies as custom post types (
forum, topic, reply). These work with Loupe Search natively: add those post types in Settings, reindex, and they’ll be searched alongside your blog posts.
- wpForo stores its forums, topics, and posts in its own custom tables, not in the WordPress posts table. Because there are no WordPress post objects to hook into, Loupe Search can’t index or return wpForo threads without custom bridging code. This isn’t something the plugin does today.
Searching multiple content types at the same time: yes
For anything stored as post types, this is core behavior. Loupe Search intercepts the main WordPress search box and returns all indexed post types together in one result set, and every result carries its post type. So blog posts plus bbPress forum content come back in the same search automatically once those post types are indexed.
The tabbed results page (Blog / Forums tabs)
Loupe Search doesn’t ship a tabbed results UI, but it exposes a REST API that makes one straightforward to build, which is exactly the kind of custom results page it’s meant for. A theme (or child theme) template can call the search endpoint and either:
- request all types at once and group the results into tabs by post type, or
- make one request per tab (for example, posts in one tab, forum content in another) so each tab paginates independently, which is closer to the BuddyPress/BuddyBoss feel.
Facet counts are available too, if you want a number next to each tab.
So, practically:
- Using bbPress: everything above works today. Selecting the forum post types and building a small REST-driven tabbed template gets you the BuddyBoss-style page.
- Using wpForo: the threads can’t be searched as-is. The options are to move to bbPress, or to have some custom development sync wpForo content into WordPress (for example into a shadow post type Loupe can index).
Opus 4.8 made an example tabbed result search page.
