bbPress

As awkward as it is to issue a new release less than 24 hours after the previous one, here it is: bbPress 0.8.2.1.

We recommend all users download and upgrade now.

Details and Upgrade Instructions

A new release! bbPress 0.8.2 has a quite a few changes and features. While you’re downloading, check out the cool new stuff.

Hierarchical Forums

Forums can now be grouped hierarchically (that is, forums can have “children”). To organize your forums, go to Content -> Forums in your bbPress’ admin panels, click “Edit Forum Order” and drag the rows around: up, down, left and right.

Make sure to “Save Forum Order” when you’re done.

“Slug” based permalinks

No longer are you constrained to topics and forums with permalinks that look like http://example.com/topic/14/. By turning on slug based permalinks, your URLs will be generated from the forum’s or topic’s title like http://example.com/topic/see-you-in-hawaii/.

Also, all of bbPress’ different permalink structures (/topic.php?id=14, /topic/14/, /topic/see-you-in-hawaii/) are interchangeable; you can switch to whichever structure you like and all your old links will still work (but see the upgrade instructions in this post).

Plugin Management

Plugins can now be activated and deactivated with the click of the mouse in bbPress 0.8.2. Just go to Site Management -> Plugins in your bbPress’ admin panels. To be activated, however, every plugin must have a “plugin header” that includes at least the plugin’s name. Here’s an example.

/*
Plugin Name: Name of your plugin required
Plugin URI: Plugin's website
Description: Short description of your plugin
Author: Your name
Author URI: Your website
Version: Current version number of your plugin
*/

As a bonus, “hidden” feature, plugins whose file name begins with an underscore (_) do not need to be activated; they will be loaded automatically and do not require a plugin header.

A few small things

Here a sampling of some of the other minor changes in bbPress 0.8.2.

• More tag cloud formatting options
• Improved consistency in tagging
• bbPress’ default Kakumei theme combines the list of “Your Tags” and “Others’ Tags”.
• No more annoying feed: before all of your RSS feed links. The feed: psuedo-standard was a clever idea, but never really caught on.
• Moderators and Admins are considered “trusted” and will never have their posts marked as spam.
• Admins can change other user’s passwords.
• More filters and actions for plugin authors
• Faster database queries

Upgrade instructions and techy info

A small security and bug fixing release, bbPress 0.8.1 is now available for download.

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After some “last minute” bug squashing, here we are: another new bbPress release ready for download. bbPress “Desmond” 0.8.

In addition to some features we already mentioned on the blog (here’s a few to recap):

• Forum deletion
• Multibyte tags
• Custom locations for themes, plugins and config.php
• Multiple theme support

there’s a couple new ones that are among our most frequently requested:

• Better timezone support; You’re no longer restricted to showing all your times in the timezone of your server (what an odd requirement that was)
• Whitespace preservation of `backticked` <code> blocks.

Upgrade Note: Your custom templates and stylesheets must now be placed in a sub-directory of my-templates/ rather than in that directory directly. Try putting your files in something like my-templates/my-hot-theme/ then selecting your theme from your bbPress’ Presentation Admin panel.

To get into the nitty gritty about what’s changed, here’s a list of tickets closed and two of code changed [2] (I couldn’t get trac to show them all on one page there’s so many!).

Translators can download the POT file for bbPress 0.8.

Because of a PHP bug, we recently discovered that a small number of bbPress users are prone to a security vulnerability. Only users of certain versions of PHP and with certain server configurations are at risk, but encourage everyone to upgrade to the newly released bbPress 0.75 regardless.

Get downloadin’!

To see what’s new, check out the lists of tickets closed and code changed.

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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After a couple of weeks of kicking the tires, we’ve decide we’ve fixed enough bugs to put out a new version of bbPress. So here it is: 0.73, the latest in the bbPress “Bix” series.

The changes in brief:

• Improved rewrite rules generation
• Template cleanup
• Much better support for non-English forums including support for right-to-left languages
• Improved installation
• Even better integration with other software
• And, of course, a small security fix

More detailed information about the changes can be gleaned from the tickets we fixed and the code we improved.

Download, and Get your bbPress on, everybody!

Learn more about 0.73 »

The moment you’ve all been waiting for has arrived. bbPress has officially been released, and we’re calling it 0.72: Bix. 0.72 after WordPress’ auspicious beginnings, and Bix for Bix Beiderbecke‘s inspiring sound and really hep name.

We think this release is pretty swell, and we can only imagine you’ll have plenty to say about it. To that end, we’ve set up some forums to get the conversations going (and to show off the goods!).

Here’s just a few things that will catch your eye.

• Fast and Light: nothing you don’t need.
• Built in spam protection by Akismet.
• Really simple interface: we want people using our software to forget that they’re using it.
• Complete integration with WordPress.
• Both the look and the functionality are highly customizable.
• RSS feeds for everything.

So download and go!