WordPress Integration
I think WordPress integration is the most important item on the roadmap for the future of bbPress.
Why?
One, it’s an embarrassing pain in the butt to do now. One of the most frequent questions here on our forums. You have to jump through endless loops, and end up with something worse than most of the WP plugins for forums.
Two, we get the benefit of all the WordPress plugins and themes, which vastly outnumber our current options. Want private messaging? Use the BuddyPress plugin for it. Want OpenID? Stats? Sitemaps? There’s a plugin for that. Social network and profile features, in particular, are useful to the future of discussion forums and it’d be silly of us to duplicate that effort.
Three, it’ll be a lot more efficient because right now if you actually do get integration going you’re getting all of WordPress and all of BackPress loaded at once, which is a waste.
Four, it’ll make our development more efficient because we’ll be able to focus on the features that make discussions better, communities thrive, and bring bbPress into a new decade, because it still looks/works a lot like the oughts.
Five, we’ll be able to leverage the huge installed base of WordPress, over twelve million self-hosted sites at last count. More users of bbPress will also mean more developers, which will make our community much more robust. I believe that the majority of all websites on the internet are going to be running WordPress in the future, so it’s a good horse for us to hitch to.
Full, seamless integration with WordPress is something I’ve discussed for years. (Remember my dream of having each comment section being a mini-bbPress forum, complete with threads?) We’ve just taken a number of unfortunate detours (BackPress) on the way there.
Isn’t WordPress already integrated with WordPress MU?
Yep.
Any timeline on this? I’ve struggled with this sort of functionality many many times. The forum plugins out there aren’t all up to spec either. bbPress integration would be wonderful.
Not yet, but will update the blog when we have more info.
that’s a great idea but WordPress needs to be more prepared for plugins and not just hacks. I’m a Joomla developer and the freamwork there, surely is a piece of art. not just the codeing but the concept of thinking ahead for things might needed next.
For WordPress, it is kind of hard to follow the real code lines and find the good documentation.
I haven’t checked out Joomla in a few years but I’ll give it another look. We’re both Open Source and it’s always good to learn from other people’s experience.
I can’t wait for bbPress to become a plugin and get all the benefits of WordPress.
Getting ready to update a WP/bb site soon, hopefully it will be the last time I have to build match WordPress and bbPress themes! More than anything, I’m looking forward to site-wide menus and widgets without hard coding anything or a bunch of extra overhead.
It’d be interesting to see what P3 with a bbPress plugin would look like.
Yup, I’ve never used bbpress because it was so annoying to install :< And there are much better standalone forums anyways, so I've gone with them.
If it were to be a plugin that would be MUCH simpler and more convenient.
Sorry it didn’t work for you before, hopefully we can win you back.
OK, but why we don’t have different name for plugin. People will be confused, we will have a situation like wp.org vs wp.com?
When we will have 1.1 released? Chris made commits last months that fixed many issued so I don’t understand why we can’t have a new version. And why we won’t get a new version of stable bbPress until there are commits for it.
Have you ever look at this? Well, simply click over red “Download” button in top right corner here. It’s embarrising. It’s been three months since redesign. There is no excuse for this.
This happens only if you have a deep integration, not if you only connect users database
Will fix up the download button right away, I had seen it before but thought it was a problem with my internet connection.
The name is going to be the same because this is my original vision for bbPress.
1.1 — we’ll see, it’s good to have community attention on it again. I will take responsibility here because I think I got some emails about it that got buried in my inbox.
In terms of deep integration, that’s the only kind of integration that matters. What use is it connecting your user tables if you have to do an entirely new version of your theme and all your plugins to make the site look the same.
Ups, I forgot a link in “Have you ever look at this“.
One of the reasons I decided AGAINST bbPress was the complicated setup involved. BuddyPress is a decent alternative, albeit chaotic for most people (they’ll choose Facebook first).
My only request is that if you do decide to have bbPress included as a plugin, could you pretty please make it so we can install it at example.com/forum instead of forum.example.com?
Just a suggestion!
Absolutely, you should be able to turn any “page” in WordPress into a bbPress forum, and optionally have the comment section of every post be a mini-forum.
Yeah this is a long time coming… Justin Tadlock just did a post on a plugin using custom post types to build a forum: http://j.mp/bcyXzI
Otherwise I’d like to see bbpress using custom post types and be integrated into that
When bbPress is integrated and becomes built as a plugin for WordPress it will be absolutely wonderful.
BTW very nice green color change! My cuppa…
Six, we would get shared search across WP and bb.
@Matt
There must be 1/2 dozen forum plugins for WordPress already.
Why then not tell the bbPress uses to just use SimplePress, of one of the other existing forum plugins?
We should probably reach out to the existing plugins and see if they want to join our effort — the idea is to have something official we can point people to, a canonical forum solution for WordPress.
Yes! And before someone comments how search sucks, check out the Sphinx stuff for WP.
Seamless WordPress/bbPress integration is essential for the success of bbPress. Most people use forums as a portion of the website and bbPress is just about perfect for that except for the integration hassle. I wish this will be fixed very soon. Thanks Matt!
Thanks for the post Matt. There are many in the bbPress community who will appreciate it.
The following comment particularly caught my attention as I don’t recall hearing you refer to the use of BackPress as an error previously:
What’s up with the lack of styling on here? I just made a blockquote and it looks any other chunk of text. And there’s no Gravatars either …
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The ONLY reason I am against it is because bbpress replies are likely to become custom post_types. I like having separate tables for the forum stuff, makes it so much easier to know what is what and where.
Threads could be posts and replies could be comments… let’s see what the team decides is best.
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It seems like it would be much easier at this point with WP 3.0. A forum thread would essentially be a custom post type, would it not?
That’s the idea.
When would this be available? is there a target date for a beta?
Great news, I can’t wait for this! Finally!
Any timeline on this?
No definite plans yet.
WP is one of the best things to happen to the Web, ever, and it’s high time that it integrated a good discussion forum. Good on ya for heading in this direction. I hope the release comes sooner rather than later. I’m ready. I’ve got clients ready for this. I’m not one of the people troubled by your naming decision for the plugin, but then I’ve never installed or depended on bbpress standalone.
Matt, great to see attention on bbPress again!
How about an importer from the most popular forum software currently, vBulletin – just like wordpress has for so many other systems to welcome existing sites to move over.
There are many of us with established vBulletin forums that would migrate if there was only a way to do so… I would love to move our vBulletin Forums to bbPress + a real BuddyPress community + WordPressMU!
When do you think that may be possible?
* the importer would just need to keep the URL structure or create a list of redirects for .htaccess so the forum site being migrated doesn’t lose all the search engine ranking it’s built up over the years.
Thanks!
Dan
Let’s wait until the bbPress plugin is available before we start making grand feature requests