JTZL’s Bulletin for bbPress

Bulletin makes a bbPress forum genuinely pleasant to read on a phone.

On the reading screens — the forums index, a single forum’s threads, a thread itself, and search — Bulletin renders its own minimal document instead of your theme’s, in a comfortable serif reading face with quiet chrome. Every other bbPress screen a reader can reach — member profiles, the topic archive, tag archives, registered views — keeps bbPress’s own markup, but inside Bulletin’s chrome, so the forum reads as one place. Nothing outside bbPress is touched: the rest of your site renders exactly as it does now.

Taking part happens in the same place. Replying, starting a thread and editing your own post are Bulletin screens too, so a member never lands on a bare theme form halfway through answering someone. And every list of forums or threads marks what is new since that member last looked.

It is a companion plugin. It never modifies bbPress, and it can be deactivated at any time with no trace.

What it does

• Full mobile takeover of the forums index, single forum, reading view and search
• Every other bbPress screen wrapped in the same chrome rather than dropped on your theme
• Continuous, decluttered reading — the thread is the content, not a card stack
• Threaded replies placed under the reply they answer, when bbPress threading is on
• Inline “load more replies” instead of jarring pagination
• Reply, start a thread, and edit your own post without leaving Bulletin
• Unread marks on the forum and thread lists, per member, cleared by opening the thread
• Thread-to-thread previous/next, scoped to the current forum, with boundary stops
• Deep links to any specific reply keep working, including past the first page
• Moderation as a mode, off by default — the controls appear only when asked for
• Native bbPress subscribe is retained, on forums and on threads
• Fully responsive — built for a phone, scales cleanly to desktop
• A REST API for mobile apps and other clients, under the same permissions as the website

What it deliberately does not do

Bulletin is subtractive by design. It adds no navigational furniture, no “best posts” ranking, and no controls that compete with the content. The reply composer rests as a single control rather than an open form, and no compose control appears anywhere bbPress would not actually accept the post.