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.
Now that the official announcement is up there has been a significant amount of traffic here, so now might be a good time to address a few common questions.
I see no reason why bbPress and WordPress can’t use identical user table structures, which would make integrating between the two relatively easy. Out of the box they’ll still use different cookie names, just because things could be messy otherwise, but changing that as well wouldn’t be too hard for people implementing unified systems.
It’s not going to be better or worse, just different. Right now it is at alpha so it has significantly less mature setup/administration tools.
bbPress uses the same plugin system as WordPress, so my goal is to keep the core as small and fast as humanly possible and let everything else happen in plugins.
Absolutely! Join the mailing list and start filing some tickets.
If you have to ask, probably not yet. You should only download bbPress at this point if you’re interested in contributing to the project. Making the installation and setup more user-friendly is one of the first priorities though.
As a bird. 
Sorry about that, I was so tired last night I forgot to set up the nightly directory after linking to it. That’s fixed now, so download away.
Well I spruced up the site a bit, fleshed out the sections a little bit and integrated Trac into the design and layout a little more. Start filing those tickets!
Two WordPress superstars, Craig and Podz, actually got to the mailing list before I did and now some nice conversations have started.
Well the first commit was on the 26th, and now it’s running the WordPress forums, so I’d say things are going pretty well so far. Welcome to the new bbPress blog that’s going to cover aspect of the development and news of bbPress.
I’m pretty happy with the speed of things right now, I just would like to clean up some parts of the code that I wrote in a hurry, and also finish the registration process. There will be no actual forums on this site until bbPress is out of developer/alpha stage and intended for people to use without being a pain to set up, until then I’ll set up a developer mailing list for those interested in the project.