bbPress

I (Sam Bauers) will be speaking about bbPress at WordCamp UK in Birmingham this weekend.

I’ll be going through how to integrate bbPress (0.9.0.2) with WordPress (2.5.1) as well as talking a little about where bbPress is heading at the moment.

There is lots of other great stuff going on, full details are available via their blog.

Or just buy tickets here.

I hope to see some bbPress users there!

We’ve now gone around the site, swept up the corners and shined the mantel. If you visited when things first launched you’ll notice everything is tidier now. Please take a look around! The forums are already starting to buzz.

I’m really excited about getting bbPress out in the public with its first public release. Michael has been doing great work and I think today, just as two years ago when I first wrote bbPress, the forum arena is in dire need of some fresh air.

bbPress is also technically pretty fun if you’re a geek. It’s how I would’ve written WordPress if I could go back in time with everything I know now. The code is clean, fast, consistent, and extensible.

There have been several changes at bbpress.org over the last couple weeks.

First off, the content of this site has been updated substantially. There is now somewhat more thorough documentation, and a more fleshed out about page.

Second, bbPress’ code has been made just that much more pluggable and convenient by syncing several of its core functions with those of WordPress.

Third, Bryan Veloso has whipped up some stylin’ new style for the bbPress default theme. People expect great things from Bryan, and, amazingly, he just keeps raising their expectations. Tips on how to create your own themes can be found in our Customization Documentation.

Fourth, the bbPress Trac has been moved to http://trac.bbpress.org/. The tickets have all been cleaned up to make way for…

Lastly, the imminent release of bbPress 0.72. Expect an announcement and some forums (no!) here on bbpress.org within the next couple of days.

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.

I just wanted to note that now bbPress can completely and seamlessly integrate and share a user system with any number of bbPress forums, and any number of WordPress or WordPress MU blogs.

To those of you who didn’t find the last post quite as exciting as I did, perhaps you’ll appreciate what the new architecture allows when you hear about its first feature: Customizable RSS feeds.

Users can specify a custom set of topics from which their personal feed will draw recent posts. Currently, users can specify a maximum of 40-100 topics (the exact number more or less depends on the total number of topics in your forums) to follow. If a user adds too many topics, the first ones added will get bumped off the list.

You can check it out by visiting your user profile in the most recent copy of bbPress (and, yes, better upgrading scripts are on the list!).

bbPress now has rudimentary tag support and gorgeous URIs that don’t require mod_rewrite. You can see both in action on the WordPress forums and I’ll be revving the tag support significantly in the coming weeks. There have also been numerous profile and performance enhancements you may want to check out.

Users can now reset passwords in bbPress, in fact we’ve updated how the system deals with failed logins completely. Feedback is a lot better now if the username or password is wrong.

I’ve caught up on most of the open bbPress bugs, so if you’re running bbPress somewhere I would recommend upgrading to the next nightly. Most notable, users can now edit their profiles and passwords and you can now override cookies to allow for easier integration.

Thanks to Ticket #7 from isharra, bbPress now has mysqli support. I can’t really tell too big a difference in the speed between mysqli and mysql, but every bit helps. If you run MySQL 4.1 and have mysqli support compiled into PHP then the improved functions are automatically used. If not, don’t worry about it.