It really is amazing that you're helping out with BBpress, it's clearly something you love as much as we do, and we desperately try not to sound ungrateful.

The issue is that when there is no project management, then it's a bit like herding cats (to quote Jane @ WordPress ;-] ). We all know and apprecaite that you're busy and that BBpress is going to take a back seat sometimes, that's to be expected mate. But you can't have it both ways.

You can't have a project where the project lead, lead developer, decision maker and talisman disappears for weeks on end; and then also seem unhappy when that doesn't go down well.

Can you imagine if you released a version of WordPress without beta testing, bulked up the code by 50%, made it 50% slower, broke most plugins, didn't have any documentation, had all the development team quit, have all bar 1 moderator quit, then leave it for 8 months not entirely working... What sort of response would there be on the WordPress forums? Maybe a bit Chicken Little.

Matt, i'm not a popular guy around here, my french/celtic phrasing winds people up when it's not my intention at all, trult i apologise if I've done that with yourself too. But you're looking at this from someone who's been really involved since November, while those of us who've been here through 0.9 and 1.02 have a different very viewpoint.

Matt, you have WP3.0, the WPfoundation, maybe BuddyPress1.2, WPcamps, travel, as well as the normal day to day stuff to deal with. Man, we know you're hella busy and we appreciate your time. But maybe you have to manage expectations a little here. Set some dates, say some hard truths, y'know, actual information "Relax. We've done this before" is probably the scariest thing i've read on the BBpress forum.

We greatly apprecaite your time mate, maybe you could apprecaite ours by giving us a heads up every now and then, rather than after the fact. Some clever soul built a blogging platform to make it easy to post info on :)

============================================================

There is no date because it's hard for me to predict how much time I have
-Matt

Versus.

"We take a page from the world of project management and we make a project plan before we jump into the dev cycle...and set a realistic release date that we stick to"
- http://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/setting-scope/

Take Care everyone.

-PRICELESS-

He does make some good points. Development is so poor atm, even I am abandoning this forum. bbPress feels kinda dead now, there was some hope when Matt did some involvement, but after 3 irc meetings or so this is gone as well. The last convulsion so to say. More and more people ar leaving and with good reason. Also some bad decisions have been made (in my oppinion) like making it a plugin for wordpress (though I understand why, but I would have liked a stand alone one too) and Backpress intergration (I mean, who is using that at all? It makes the forum way slower and bigger too). To be honest 0.9 is and feels way faster then 1.x and has many good and working plugins.

It's a shame, it could have been some great forum software, it started so good :-(

If you would like to contribute to 1.1, please test the two major feature additions to 1.1 and submit patches for improvements and/or bug fixes to those features.

There are dozens of patches lying in the trac which are not being implemented (maybe because of lack of attention/lead developer). And when any major commit is made, patches become out-of-date, so they should be added now. Many of them are bugs which really need to be fixed.

Please read them again. In summary: 1.1 release will include email notifications and anonymous posting, both of which are in trunk and would appreciate testing and patches. After that it's bug fixes, and release.

If you would like to contribute to 1.1, please test the two major feature additions to 1.1 and submit patches for improvements and/or bug fixes to those features.

There is no date because it's hard for me to predict how much time I have.

What I'm looking for is someone to clearly define the product roadmap. This is something we have NEVER had.

Even reading the blog, irc and this forum - it's still unclear to me what should be worked on for the next release. What will make it in, what won't.

The problem with just looking at Trac is that anyone can just add a ticket to a release. Which then makes it appear the next release will never get completed because tickets just pile up.

http://trac.bbpress.org/roadmap

We need you to:

* Clearly establish what the next major features/work/purpose will be for the next release.
* Define exactly which tickets in Trac should be worked on for each release and those tickets to not work no, move those tickets to a future release.
* Set hard dates to have it completed by so that we have a target to work towards.

The bullets above does the following: It keeps those of us that can code focused to only work on what's important (and also informs us what to work on if we're not aware). It gives us a target to hit, right now we're very blind.

This is what I'm looking for in a Benevolent Dictator. Don't get me wrong, I love your involved but we need someone to provide some organization.

To give an example of a project that excutes the bullets above well is Edgewall, the makers of Trac. Just look at the following link on how well organized their releases are. Includes release date, pre-req tickets to fix, etc. http://trac.edgewall.org/roadmap

People like to be told what to do. Just tell us what to do ... you'd be surprised at how many people will perform once asked and they know the target. (Just saying "please contribute code" is not enough, we need to be told specifically what needs to be contributed)

Thank you for keeping up with this thread! It is nice to see you around here!

I own a license for IP.Board 3 and vBulletin 4 which are the best professional (paid) bulletin board solutions. Now I started using BBpress two weeks ago because I felt like I had to "see" how much progress the software had made. It has made some progress since I last use it but if you compare it to its big brother (WordPress) it hasn't really make a drastic chance. The simplicity and easy of use BBpress offers is amazing. That's why I like to keep up with the developer news and updates... I would hate to see this project die because of luck of a developer team...

Thank for reading this post!

fyi:
Matt, you're an amazing person. WordPress is an awesome project and so is BBpress! Thank you for bringing us these two projects!

I've been keeping up with this conversation with the new email notification feature, for what it's worth. :)

I think you're missing the bigger point trying to be made.

Every "community project", as you put it, has a Benevolent Dictator ... someone who LEADS the project. bbPress for the past 6 months hasn't had such a leader.

Frankly, many of us thought YOU were stating that you would take over that role as bbPress project lead. Apparently not.

If you don't want that role, please post a blog post on it - that way we as a community can find someone else to drive/lead the bbPress project because clearly noone now from automatic has cared about bbPress since Sam left.

Not to be rude, but no wonder why both Sam and _ck_ left. I'm feeling like a battered women who just now realized that I've been abused for the past 2 years.

Unfortunately, the people who care about bbPress (and we complain because we care) are not always the same people who can help with programming.

I wish as much effort went into more productive activity

Like what mate?
Plugins?
Themes?

We've been sitting with a semi-functioning release for over 6 months, and there's a new version coming out at some unknown point in the future, and given the track record, we can't develop anything for it becasue BBpress releases = break loads of things from before.

Heck even your single solitary remaining moderator has told people that. (i don't want to requote chris too much, he's been a great mod who's workign his socks off here, and don't want to back him into a corner).

With the upmost respect bud, we can only go on what we're told. And we're told to check the blog, then we're told to check the weekly IRC logs, then we're told to check trac updates, then we're told to check commits etc etc. Every time someone pulls a "chicken little" the place they're told to check for updates doesn't have any, and then they come back a bit more worried.

We're not intentionally pulling a "chicken little" every 10 mins matey, we're just trying to keep up. It takes very little time (thanks to a wonderful blogging platform ;-] ) to post saying "no irc chat for 3 weeks folks", and the problem is solved.

Much like spam, it's best prevented before it sets in, rather than being unhappy about it afterwards. May i suggest that less of the "Wizard of Oz" routine (man behind the curtain saying all is well) might diminish some of the "Chiken Little" routine that seems to irk? Maybe communication could be considered your Akismet :)

What i'm not sure you get it mate (and you might, so i'll apologise if you do), that alot of us are in limbo with this. We're all in a holding pattern waiting for this mythical next release, and man, we want to help. But with no communication, its really hard.

http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2003-10-12/

That said, really hope you had a great time on your travels :D

http://johnjamesjacoby.com/category/buddypress/

bbPress does not have a lead developer right now. Automattic founder and bbPress creator Matt Mullenweg ( http://ma.tt/ ) was hosting weekly bbPress chats and jamming out a few features along with another Automattic dev, but that stopped a while ago and we haven't heard from Matt since.

It's not likely that Andy is going to switch tracks and work on bbPress... he's pretty focused on BuddyPress, and it has an ambitious product map that should keep him busy!

Maybe Matt will come back to us after his schedule clears up... we'll find out soon enough!

I think that Automattic works increasingly on BuddyPress before developing on bbPress at the moment – yesterday has appeared the Second Release Candidate of BuddyPress 1.2.

The Trac shows BuddyPress 1.2 no longer in the originally planned schedule, but the official release will be soon. :)

I can imagine that after publication of BuddyPress 1.2 the work will be focused at bbPress again. Automattic hopes for the big success of a Single Installation of WordPress (2.9.1/3.0) together with BudyPress as social network module.

Then – as we can hope - bbPress is the third component that will be integrated.

Greetings
Markus

I asked Andy (one of the lead developers of BuddyPress) and there will probably never be a proper out-of-the-box way to have multiple bbPress installs integrated with a single BuddyPress install (unless of course someone develops a plugin to do so independent of BuddyPress's standard release)

Looks like it will be one bbPress install paired with one BuddyPress install integration wise.

For most folks this is not a major deal but I personally didn't like this. I was excited about the idea of tons of bbPress forums integrated together (same user database) working properly with one BuddyPress install. oh well.

The sticking point? The 'activity stream' is tricky when it comes to showing bbPress forum activity. I got the multiple bbPress installs working in the sense that they all shared the same user databases but the 'activity stream' didn't want to show the forum activity on the various independent bbPress installs.

The thing I dislike the most about BuddyPress is how the 'activity stream' is in relation to 'Groups' and, you guessed it, bbPress. Still having a dog of a time getting these things to work together with a NORMAL one-to-one BuddyPress bbPress integration!!!

In terms of BuddyPress versus bbPress: BuddyPress actually uses bbPress code to power its forums. So using BuddyPress isn't exactly walking away from bbPress... bbPress comes standard with a BuddyPress install!

In terms of what you use to power your sites, it's probably best to choose your software solution based on your needs. If you want a social network with blogs thrown on top, BuddyPress is a good bet. If you want forum software with a plugin architecture, bbPress is currently the only game in town.

BuddyPress does have a good forum, as far as I've heard. You can learn more about how bbPress was integrated with Buddypress in this IRC log:
http://bbpress.org/blog/2009/12/2009-12-09-meetup/

You can ask Andy directly about forums in BuddyPress too:
http://twitter.com/apeatling

Or John James Jacoby:
http://twitter.com/johnjamesjacoby

He was active here for a while and then became a dev for BuddyPress. He would be a good one to ask about the energy required.