2010-07-21 Meetup
IRC log from the meetup on July 21, 2010
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.