bbPress

Most of those who follow the tech-blog-o-sphere* will be aware of the recent financial news regarding Automattic, the company that more or less stewards bbPress’ production.

For the rest of you here are some links that cover the story.

Some people may be wondering what this news means for bbPress. Well, for a start this funding has already impacted on the project as it made my full-time employment with Automattic possible three months ago when the arrangement was in it’s early stages. But more importantly it now allows Automattic to have the financial security to back bbPress into the foreseeable future.

We have some awesome things in the pipe including improvements to the bbPress core, the bbpress.org website and, in the not too distant future, the launch of a hosted community service by Automattic based on bbPress.

In the meantime, we will be ramping up the pace of development and attempting to bring out some of the new features that have been on the “to-do” list for far too long. Features which we hope will help to differentiate bbPress from the crowd and make it a truly useful tool for building online communities.

* NB: Not an actual word

I’ll be at WordCamp Melbourne this weekend to reprasent bbPress. It’s a good opportunity for both seasoned bbPress users and newbs to find out more about our favourite forum software. As the crowd will be mainly WordPressers, I’ll be focusing the discussion on integration with WordPress and a few of the more WordPress-centric plugins.

Automattic developer Alex Shiels will be there as well as other local blogging luminaries. Check out the full program here (pdf), and RSVP on Upcoming soon, it’s almost full.

The meetup yesterday was really enjoyable, lot’s of good ideas about how bbPress is going to evolve in the future. Doug Stewart has a pretty thorough write-up of the night, including the movie interlude afterward. Hopefully like R. Kelly, bbPress development will no longer be trapped in the closet.

As Matt points out, he and I will be at San Francisco’s Chaat Cafe for the first (EV4R!) bbPress meetup on the evening of Monday, June 11th.

I’m excited to meet Sam Bauers and Doug Stewart (who are the catalysts for the meetup) in person and all of the rest of you who can make it.

w00t!

Perhaps more excitingly, this blog (and bbPress itself) will see much more frequent updates in the near future. Good times ahead.

After lots of hints and hushed voices, the bbPress plugin browser is here.

We’re offereing this up as a centralized source of bbPress plugins. Hopefully, for all us users, that will mean one-stop shopping when looking for plugins.

And for you developers, anyone can host their plugin there. We keep track of comments, ratings, and download stats for you. You even get your own little corner of the bbPress plugin development center (a trac install) for you to keep track of bugs, tickets, changes and versions of your plugin.

Many thanks go out to Aditya for helping me test and debug the site, and to Stefano and Trent as well for early adoption.

After a month of waiting, bbPress 0.74 is finally available for download. Even if it did take a while, we’ve fixed a several important things.

Aditya has a great overview of the changes, but here’s a few of the bigger ones.

1. init hook has been changed to bb_init for better compatibility with WordPress.
2. When users are deleted, they’re really deleted now.
3. Somewhat simpler installation procedure. When installing, you’ll also be informed if any of those little configuration variables are incorrectly set.
4. A place to store options in the database! Woo!

We’ve got some slick new features we’re working on for the next release (did someone say “themes”?), so stick around….

In the meantime, read on for some more technical details about this release.

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With bbPress 0.73 out, bbPress is much better equipped to handle localization to whatever language you speak.

We’d like to encourage such localization by offering a centralized resource for localization files, support and anything else needed by the international community.

Please leave a comment here to let us know what language you speak (and fill in your email!) if you’d like to get involved. (We have some pretty heavy moderation in effect; don’t worry if your comment doesn’t appear right away.)

And apologies ahead of time; I only speak English. Italian used to be a second language of mine, but that was tanti anni fa.

I just came across the original post announcing bbPress on my blog. It’s interesting to read back on that post and comments, like going back through a time warp.

Richard Boakes, one of the first users of Akismet, has a nice summary of the benefits of bbPress.

Jazzle says,  “bbPress is a fantastic example of how the web should be made.”

Since we dropped it last night, bbPress has had 289 downloads. (We’ll look at getting a counter up like we have for WP.) When you Google for bbPress there are about 340k hits.

Many of you will remember the dark days of the bbPress Trac. For several months it was getting hit by spammers multiple times a day.

Matt put a stop to new spam a couple of months ago, but there was still a huge amount of garbage blocking up our ticketing system. All of that is now gone. Well, I’m sure I missed some here and there.

This daunting task would have been completely impossible were it not for the following three things.

1. The Ticket Delete Plugin for trac by Noah Kantrowitz. The interface is clunky (limitations in the Trac plugin API?), but it gets the job done. Kills spam dead.
2. Jesse Ruderman’s Check Range Greasemonkey script. This thing is awesome. Move over, sliced bread.
3. Tom Preuss. Many people helped reduce spammer damage by closing tickets and so forth, but Tom gets the gold star. His faithful invalidating of spam tickets through the darkest of bbPress’ days made searching for and eliminating trash a piece of cake. Many thanks to Tom and the others who stepped in.

Thanks in part to the hard work of Juan Correa (PotterSys) and Ryan Boren, bbPress is now almost completely "gettexted" which means that all of the strings in the software can be translated and replaced on the fly. Some other code improvements have also come along the way.

All SVN changes are now being mailed to our mailing list and I've also fixed up the nightly builds so they're generating correctly now.