bbPress

bbPress has seen some pretty interesting development over the past weeks. Just to keep people in the know, and since many were expecting bbPress 0.80 to come out a couple weeks ago (we’re still learning here ), here’s a short list of some new features that will be in the next release.

• Better support for right-to-left languages.
• Some better backend support for search queries.
• Removal of the topic_resolved column from the database. No more “this topic is not a support question” strangeness for forums that aren’t support forums. Those people that want to keep such functionality around will be very pleased with Aditya’s Support Forum plugin.
• The ability to delete forums. (No!) Yes!
• Tags that are multibyte aware (you’ll be able to tag in Japanese).
• Multiple theme support. You’ll be able to upload a bunch of themes and select which one you want from the Admin panels.
• A more pluggable database class and user system.
• Anywhere-you-want-them plugins directory, templates directory, and config.php. This is pretty nice; you’ll be able install a completely “clean” copy of bbPress in, for example, a directory named public_html/forums/ and have your templates stored in public_html/templates/, your plugins stored in public_html/plugins/ and your config.php file in public_html/config.php. None of your custom stuff ever has to be in bbPress’ public_html/forums/ directory, so upgrades will be a snap.

Of course, we’re still working out some bugs and have a few more important things to get done before the next release, but that’s a preview of things to come.