bbpress forums full-width

[JohnRDOrazio]

The Ignite theme looks really great with Buddypress and bbPress forums. However, when entering a forum I would prefer to get more screen space dedicated to the forum. It is very squished and difficult to read and navigate with the right-hand sidebar showing. Any way of hiding the sidebar when bbPress forums are open?

If I create a page on the website “Forum” and I put the bbpress shortcode [bbp-forum-index] on that page, and set the template to full-width, I can at least see the Forum index full page when going there from the menu item.

However, my forums are linked to Buddypress groups, so certain members have access to certain forums according to the group they are in. When entering a forum even from the forum index page I created, it automatically redirects (as is understandable) to community -> groups -> [groupname] -> forum. And there is no option for choosing a full page width template from here…

[Ben Sibley]

Thanks for the kind words about Ignite!

I hadn’t anticipated the full-width template missing for this – good catch. If you can link me directly to one of these pages, I will write a CSS snippet for you that will make the page wider.

[JohnRDOrazio]

I’m not even sure there would be a template, it perhaps depends more on buddypress and bbpress because the group and forum pages are “virtual” pages that are created directly by buddypress and bbpress. They don’t show up under “pages” in the admin area. The forums can be managed under “forums” in the admin area but there are just a few attributes that can be set from there (whether it’s a subforum, whether it’s private or public, who the moderators are…) I’m not sure if a theme can add a “template” section there, if it could that would be great.
I could add css to my child theme to make the “#main” area wider but in order to do that, I would like to hide the sidebar when navigating into the forums. In fact, I only have an ajax login widget in the main sidebar and it’s not all that necessary to have that widget once you’re logged in: profile management and logging out can be done from the wordpress “admin” bar at that point. Using some other themes I am able to set the visibility of widgets to certain pages or to only logged in or only logged out users. I’m not seeing those options for any of the widgets I add to the Ignite theme sidebar… How can I hide the ajax login widget once a user is logged in, and remove the sidebar?

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by JohnRDOrazio.

[JohnRDOrazio]

I was able to remove the sidebar for logged-in users by copying sidebar-primary.php to my child theme and just adding a check whether user is logged in:

<?php
// don't output on WooCommerce pages like Cart and Checkout
if ( function_exists( 'is_woocommerce' ) ) {
	if ( is_cart() || is_checkout() || is_account_page() ) {
		return;
	}
}
if ( is_active_sidebar( 'primary' ) && !is_user_logged_in() ) : ?>
	<aside id="sidebar-primary-container" class="sidebar-primary-container">
		<h1 class="screen-reader-text"><?php esc_html_e('Primary Sidebar', 'ignite'); ?></h1>
		<div class="sidebar sidebar-primary" id="sidebar-primary" role="complementary">
			<?php dynamic_sidebar( 'primary' ); ?>
		</div>
	</aside>
<?php endif; ?>

[Ben Sibley]

The conditional you’ve added to the sidebar looks good – nice solution.

If you ever decide to include more widgets that you still want logged in visitors to see, you could add the Widget Options plugin to your site. That will give you a simple way to control the visibility of individual widgets on your site.