Group Forums with bbPress

Overview

LearnDash provides an official bbPress integration plugin that allows the association of bbPress forums with LearnDash courses, enabling students enrolled in courses to have exclusive access to course-specific discussion forums.

The Group Forums with bbPress module is based on LearnDash’s excellent plugin but modified to support the association of bbPress forums with LearnDash groups, enabling members of LearnDash groups to have exclusive access to group-specific discussion forums.

Creating group-restricted forums

Activating the module adds a new metabox to the Edit Forum page:

To configure group access to the forum:

1. In the Associated Groups(s) box, select the group(s) that should have access to this forum.
2. In the Post Limit Access dropdown, choose whether a user needs to be a member of ALL of the selected groups or ANY of the selected groups to have access.
3. If you would like forum posts to visible to all users on the site check the Forum View checkbox. The forum will be readable for all site users, but only members in the selected group(s) will be allowed to post topics and replies.

Group Forums widget

When active, this module adds a new Group Forums widget.  This widget displays a list of links to all group-specific forums the current user has access to.

Using this module with the LearnDash bbPress integration plugin

If you want to use the both this module and the LearnDash bbPress integration plugin, keep these rules in mind:

• If you add restrictions for course enrollment AND group membership, only users that satisfy both restrictions will have access the forum.
• If you add restrictions for course enrollment AND group membership and check the Forum View checkbox for one restriction but not the other, users that meet only the restriction for which the box is not checked will be able to view the forum.
  • Example: The Forum View checkbox is checked for the course restriction but not the group restriction.  Users that meet only the group restriction will be able view the forum.  Users that meet the only the course restriction or neither restriction will see the access denied message set in the group forums Message shown to users without access field.