Many thanks go out to Steven J. Murdoch for identifying the issue (CVE-2008-1930) and working with us and WordPress to resolve it.

Note: Those of you with integrated WordPress/bbPress installs should upgrade WordPress first and then will probably have to update the “WordPress database secret” setting in your Settings -> WordPress Integration: Cookies admin panel after upgrading bbPress.

Primarily this is a compatibility release so that we can continue to provide the same integration levels with WordPress as in the past, however quite a few other improvements have made their way into this version.

Improvements and changes include:

• New installer: 
  • Creates your bb-config.php file for you when possible.
  • Allows for setting up integration with WordPress at install time.
  • Supports languages other than English when language translations are available.
  • Looks pretty.
• Additional RSS feeds for views.
• A “new topics” RSS feed, available on the front-page and on each forum. This feed only returns the first post from each new topic as it is created, instead of all posts.
• More configurable <title> tag available to themes.
• More secure authentication cookies which are compatible with WordPress 2.5
• Passwords now stored using “phpass” hashing library instead of md5. If you still want to store your passwords as md5 for any reason, there is a plugin here which will do that for you.
• A second core theme called “Kakumei Blue”. This theme demonstrates just how little you need to do to start creating a new theme.
• “General” and “WordPress Integration” options configurable via admin interface.
• Built-in support for Gravatars, implemented in a way that makes 3rd-party avatar plugins much easier to author.
• New “Date and time format” and “Date format” options.
• Akismet and Bozo functionalities have been moved to plugins. Akismet key now enterable via an admin interface.
• Removed “replies” querystring argument (?replies=#) from topic links. If you still want that functionality, there is a plugin here which should emulate it.
• Fixes to use of PHP “glob()” function to avoid errors on hosts that don’t support it.
• Moderators can now manage tags by default.
• Fixes to slug incrementing.
• The old “admin_email” setting is now called “from_email”. This is now the email address that emails from your installation appear to come from.
• “No replies” view is now technically “no replies and greater than 2 hours old”.
• Improvements to the export script towards the integration of an upcoming import script.
• RSS feeds now sent as UTF-8
• Full support for slug-based feeds on forum and topic feeds.
• Keymasters can no longer be demoted by non-keymasters.
• Many other smaller bug and typo fixes.

Installation

We have provided updated and more detailed installation and integration instructions in the documentation.

Upgrading

Upgrade instructions are available in the documentation here.

Dedication

bbPress 0.9 is named “Brubeck” after American Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck. In his early career he often performed with saxophonist Paul Desmond, after whom bbPress 0.8 was named. Brubeck has composed a number of jazz standards many of which employ complex rhythms and unusual time signatures.

There are a few changes in 0.9 which plugin developers need to be aware of. So here are some notes to help you get your plugins running under the new release.

Detecting version 0.9

First of all if you want to detect whether someone is running version 0.9 or higher you can use this code:

if (version_compare(bb_get_option('version'), '0.9-z', '>=')) {
	// Tell us what your name is!
	echo('This is bbPress version 0.9 or higher.');
}

Note: The “-z” on the end will make sure you catch all pre-release versions of bbPress 0.9 as well, like “0.9-dev”.

Removing deprecated function calls

There are a number of no-longer-used functions from previous versions that we provide backwards compatibility for in bb-includes/deprecated.php. So you may not have noticed that your plugin is still using some of them. In version 0.9 we have made detecting your use of these a little easier by providing a way to report their use via PHP errors when they get called.

Just open up the file bb-includes/deprecated.php and change the “BB_LOG_DEPRECATED” constant at the top of the file from the boolean false to true.

Now if one of the many deprecated functions gets called it will be written to the same place that your PHP errors are written (either an error log or to the screen). The errors will tell you which deprecated function was called and what to replace it with.

Removing deprecated constants

A whole bunch of PHP constants have been deprecated in this release in an attempt to standardise our naming of constants. For now we are providing backwards compatibility for the older constants, but you should check your own usage of these and change them to use the correct ones.

Unfortunately there is no way to log these to errors, so this is a manual find and replace task. Two arrays of constants and their replacements can be found in bb-settings.php starting at line 304.

New “bb-plugins” directory for core plugins only

There is a new directory called bb-plugins in the root of the bbPress codebase. This directory is reserved for plugins that are distributed with the core bbPress files. Third-party plugins should still be stored in a separate my-plugins directory. Do not instruct users to install files in the bb-plugins directory, they are functionally no different from each other, except that the bb-plugins directory has more potential to be destroyed during user upgrades. You have been warned!!!

Storage of active plugins and active theme in options

Formerly we stored active plugins in a serialized array where each plugin was identified using it’s relative path from the my-plugins directory, e.g. “plugin.php” or “folder/plugin.php”. With the advent of core plugins there exists a need to differentiate between “core” and “user” plugins.

We are doing so by prefixing either “core#” or “user#” to the plugin, so the previous examples in the my-plugins folder would become “user#plugin.php” and “user#folder/plugin.php” in the same serialized array.

Similarly we are changing the way the active theme is stored. Instead of saving the absolute path to the active them, instead we are simply storing it’s name, i.e. the name of the directory it is contained prefixed with either “core#” or “user#” depending on it’s location.

Plugin activation and deactivation hooks

The correct way to register a function to run on plugin activation is like this:

function foo() {
	echo 'bar!';
}

bb_register_plugin_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'foo');

Provided that the file you are registering in is the base plugin file. Do not hardcode the plugin file name as users may move them into directories inside the plugins directory.

Registering a function to run on plugin deactivation is similar except you need to call bb_register_plugin_deactivation_hook()

Built-in avatar support

With the inclusion of built-in avatar support you may think that all the time you spent on that custom avatar plugin is wasted. But actually, it is quite the opposite. By incorporating avatar calls into the default templates and providing a fully pluggable and filterable get_avatars() function, integrating avatars is actually easier than ever.

New plugin browser

One thing that might have slipped by without enough attention is the new plugin browser which was recently implemented. Go have a play and check out all of the newness.

Thanks…

And finally, a big thanks to all our plugin developers for contributing so much to the bbPress community. If you have any ideas about how we can help you build better plugins, then let us know.

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

This version is not the latest development release so as to remain as compatible as possible with the current version of WordPress.

The primary reason for the release is to fix some bugs in the MySQLi implementation. We anticipate that MySQLi support will be dropped in the future and to this end we have made MySQL the default extension instead of MySQLi.

A few other fixes and enhancements have also snuck in:

• Deep forum breadcrumbs with thanks to baptiste
• More consistent topic labeling methods - users of the support forum plugin will probably need to upgrade to version 2.3.3
• Some fixes to stop orphaned sub-forums from disappearing from all view
• There is now one of those fancy checkboxes to mark a user as a bozo

A couple of those changes will affect existing themes. If you have questions about adapting your theme to be compatible with the new topic labeling and forum breadcrumb features, then ask over on this forum topic.

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.

Other bug fixes include:

• Broken forum hierarchies
• Tag inconsistencies
• and a bunch of fixes making it easier to write cool plugins.

In addition to the above bugs, you can also check out the exact code changes.

To add a view, you should instead use a new function: bb_register_view(). Also available is bb_deregister_view() for removing the default views or views added by other plugins.

function my_plugin_views() {
/*
  bb_register_view(
            $view_slug,
            $view_title,
            $bb_query_argument_array
  );
*/

  bb_register_view(
            'more-than-5',
            'Topics with more than five posts',
            array( 'post_count' => '>5' )
  );

  bb_register_view(
            'old-timers',
            'Topics started before 2005',
            array( 'started' => '<2005' )
  );

  // Remove default 'Topics with no tags' view
  bb_deregister_view( 'untagged' );
}

add_action( 'bb_init', 'my_plugin_views' );

If you really need more complicated queries, you have the following filters at your disposal, just by registering your view in the above fashion (assuming the $view_slug is “my-view”).

• bb_view_my-view_distinct
• bb_view_my-view_fields
• bb_view_my-view_join
• bb_view_my-view_where
• bb_view_my-view_group_by
• bb_view_my-view_having
• bb_view_my-view_order_by
• bb_view_my-view_limit

If that sounds complicated, it probably is Most plugin developers will never have to do much besides filter a join or where here and there.

I mention that because the current version of bbPress (version 0.8.2) is not compatible with WordPress 2.3 if you are loading both scripts at the same time. If you’re not loading both scripts at the same time, everything is fine.

A new version of bbPress will be coming out in a day or two as soon as we get done testing it, and that version will fully compatible with the latest version of WordPress once again.

Maintaining this large group of functions and keeping them all consistent was beginning to become a nuisance. Additionally, it was annoying to have either to write a whole new function or to hack filters into and onto an existing function every time a new database query was needed.

To help alleviate both of these problems, the next version of bbPress will come with a BB_Query class, which all of the above referenced functions will use.

For developers and plugin authors, this means it’ll will now be really easy to query the database for posts and topics based on whatever arbitrary criteria is needed. For users, the following couple paragraphs will be boring, but see the news below

Example

As an example, the following code will select all the topics written by mdawaffe in June of 2007 and having the “bbPress” tag and will sort those topics by their start time.

$topic_query = new BB_Query( 'topic',
	array(
		'topic_author' => 'mdawaffe',
		'started' => '2007-06',
		'tag' => 'bbpress',
		'order_by' => 'topic_start_time'
	)
);
$topic_query->results; // Here's the array of topics the query returned.

Both the incoming parameters and the SQL query that the class generates are highly filterable (in a way that’s backward compatible with the current version of bbPress), so further customization should be easy. Also, the BB_Query class can automatically handle pagination, caching and more, so you can relax and get on with more interesting things.

New feature: better search

In the end, though, we write code for users, not for developers; we want the user experience to be as pleasant as possible. With all these new bells and whistles, users get some pretty cool new features.

The default theme will now let you constrain your search to an individual forum (and adding that ability into other themes will be super easy). Adding extra constraints (like searching by tag or author) will be easy too.

In the admin section, you can search both topics and posts by a number of criteria.

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