In the past we’ve had a range of involvement, from developers to designers (to a totally empty channel.) This time around I’d like to openly invite anyone that’s interested in getting in on the ground floor of development, testing, and theming the up-and-coming bbPress plugin to join us, and be part of building something crazy-super awesome.

We’re going to try to have them every other Wednesday at 4pm EST (UTC - 5) starting on February 23, 2011. If this time absolutely does not work for you and you really want to be there, post an alternative time in the comments and let’s figure something out that works for everyone.

Hope to see you then, and many fortnights to follow!

I set an alarm! Will see everyone next Wednesday.

In other news, the poll results are starting to firm up. Winners? Integration with WordPress far and away, followed by anonymous posting, WYSIWYG, and email notifications. We’re not going to follow these exactly, but it definitely gives us an idea of what people are most interested in and now we have to look behind the answers at what people mean when they say they want something. For example maybe rather than WYSIWYG we could bring over Oembed support from WordPress? I usually think of WYSIWYG more as a layout thing but a lot of people see it as the only way to include rich media. I’ll dig more into these.

It has been public for a while that Automattic was going to launch a hosted forum service based on bbPress and the decision was made early on to not call it bbPress.com for three reasons.

1. It avoids the sort of confusion users experience trying to distinguish between WordPress.org and WordPress.com
2. bbPress is not a particularly good product name for that service
3. The bbPress.com domain name is already registered to someone else

The last reason is fairly conclusive.

So the name TalkPress was chosen. As a joke we put up a phpBB forum at TalkPress.com for a while, which we all found quite amusing until it got heavily spammed, so down that came!

In the meantime we have been preparing bbPress to accommodate many of the needs that this new service would require, specific functionality has included preparing bbPress to handle the huge user tables of WordPress.com – some of this work is already available to bbPress users (even if it’s only really useful if you have millions of users).

The architecture behind WordPress.com demanded that we make bbPress play nice with the HyperDB extension for WordPress. This neat database load-balancing and redundancy tool is now fully compatible with bbPress. So if you want to run your bbPress site with redundant MySQL databases in multiple datacenters then that’s possible now too. bbPress now has a pretty enviable set of advanced options for MySQL connectivity.

Finally, the secret sauce of TalkPress.com is an extension called “bbPress Channels”. bbPress Channels does for bbPress what WordPress MU does for WordPress, except that it is a single file that is simply included in a standard bbPress install rather than being a complete fork of bbPress.

I call it an extension, because strictly speaking it isn’t a plugin. Some of you may have noticed the “BB_CHANNELS_INCLUDE” constant floating around in bb-settings.php, this is where that file gets included. The bbPress Channels code is not ready for release yet, but it will be released as open source code at a later date.

TalkPress itself is not open for public signup at this stage. Currently we are bringing on a few “VIP” partners so that we can run-in the platform in a more controlled way. The pioneers on the service are Time Inc. who are incorporating a TalkPress forum into their Health.com website. I’m happy to report back to the bbPress community that TalkPress (and thus bbPress) withstood their rigorous security testing with flying colours. This testing incorporated, amongst other things, comprehensive XSS and SQL injection tests.

As for bbPress, some movement has occurred in the priorities leading up to a final 1.0 release. Some of the more fundamental changes that were planned are being put on the back-burner so that these aims can be achieved:

1. Full compatability with both WordPress 2.7 and 2.8
2. Easier integration steps for WordPress MU
3. Retaining compatibility with the existing catalogue of current plugins

This means that some things, like the planned re-factoring of the rewrite methods, are being postponed until some future version or even removed from the radar completely.

The next Alpha version of bbPress is imminent and will likely be the last bbPress 1.0 Alpha version. From there we will move into Beta and hopefully quite quickly through to Release Candidates for 1.0 in the next couple of months.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For your viewing pleasure, you can check out a list of tickets closed and code committed for this release. A list of new bugs we’ve introduced is forthcoming

Also, Aditya has compiled a list of the new hooks and has graciously allowed me to post them here for all you developers to see.

Filters

• get_forums_where: Filter the Where clause to get all forums
• get_forum_where: Filter the Where clause to get single forum
• get_forums: Filter the forums retrieved
• bb_get_option_{option_name}: Filter the value of the option
• bb_get_option_from_db_{option_name}: Filter the value of the option retrieved from database
• bb_delete_meta: Filter the delete meta data variables
• bb_verify_email: Filter the verification of email
• bb_title: Filter Title being displayed
• bb_get_title: Filter the title
• post_author_title: Filter the title of the author being displayed
• post_author_type: Filter the Role of the author being displayed
• allowed_markup: Filter the display of the allowed markup
• get_allowed_markup: Filter the allowed markup
• get_user_type_label: Filter the display of User Type (Role)
• get_user_type: Filter the User Type (Role)
• user_title: Filter the display of User Title
• get_user_title: Filter the User Title
• tag_heat_map: Filter the display of tag_heat_map
• sanitize_profile_info: Filter the Profile Info Keys
• sanitize_profile_admin: Filter the Profile Admin Keys

Actions

• bb_ajax_{action_name}: Custom action for Ajax
• bb_delete_user: Custom action when deleting user
• sort_tag_heat_map: Hook for sorting the tag heat map
• bb_init: Remember, init has changed to bb_init. This will break some plugins that used the init hook.

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.