GD bbPress Toolbox

Most modern standalone forum system supports special BBCodes for the content markup for adding basic styling. GD bbPress Toolbox adds support for BBCodes based on phpBB implementation, but also adds many more new codes. Version 5.8 of the plugin has a total of 45 BBCodes. All BBCodes are implemented as shortcodes and can be made available outside the forums.

BBCodes Overview and Settings

To see all the available BBCodes along with all the variants each code supports, you can do that from the plugin admin side BBCodes panel, BBCodes List group of panels. But, each BBCode supports additional standard attributes that are available to every BBCode (style (for inline CSS styling) and class (for extra CSS classes))). Here is how the BBCodes are presented in this list:

Standard settings for BBCodes include options to enable/disable BBCodes, make them available outside of bbPress content and show notice inside topic/reply form about them. You can also limit user roles that can use the BBCodes. For some BBCodes you have additional settings to configure default behaviour of the BBCodes: source code, attachment, quote, hide…). And, you have a full panel where you can disable any BBCode you don’t plan to use.

List of all currently supported BBCodes

Here is the list of all BBCodes available in the latest plugin version.

BBCodes Limitations

Since the plugin uses WordPress shortcode parser to parse and process BBCodes, it has the same limitations as WordPress:

• You can nest BBCodes as long as they are different types. You can have UL wrapper BBCode and inside of it, you can have LI BBCodes. But, you can’t have another level with UL again.
• You can’t nest the same type of BBCodes. You can’t have UL inside another UL. Ordered or unordered list in HTML is allowed, and you can have UL, inside it several LI tags, and in those LI tags, you can have another UL. This will not work in WordPress, and BBCodes written like that will also fail to render properly. This will not change until WordPress fixes the issue.
• BBCode with short notation will not work. If you want to have BBCode like this one: [url=https://www.dev4press.com/], that will not work, this must be written in full notation: [url url=”https://www.dev4press.com/”].

BBCodes Toolbar

BBCodes Toolbar is a replacement for the plain bbPress topic/reply editor. This replacement adds a simple to use toolbar with available BBCodes as buttons. Through settings, you can control which BBCodes groups are visible in the toolbar, which size of the toolbar to use and user roles that can see and use this toolbar. There are some other tweaks too.

Toolbar Limitations

The BBCodes Toolbar is not a full editor for BBCodes! It is a simple addition to the plain textarea control with BBCodes button added. If you click on the button on the toolbar, the plugin will insert empty BBCode for that button and you need to add content to it. If you select some content and click toolbar button, the plugin will wrap selected content in the BBCode. That is all the plugin does with the BBCodes toolbar.