What's happening with bbPress? « bbPress Support Forums

Posted 6 months ago #

Every once in a while I come and see BBpress' progress and wow and surprise people like _ck_ are gone. What's going on here, Matt? We need a BBpress Dev Team. Seriously, BBpress is a nice bulletin board that deserves more attention. Lean and clean.

Posted 6 months ago #

I've given site and commit access to close to 10 people. Besides putting in my own time, which I do when I can, there's not much else I can do.

Posted 6 months ago #

Devote some resources to bbPress? Put someone in charge of the project?

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

Posted 6 months ago #

Yes, and the dearth of coders is the hardest to work around. Without code contributions bbPress will never be a community project.

frooyo
Member

Posted 6 months ago #

@Matt

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.

Posted 6 months ago #

That's not how it happened at all. I have been leading the project and sheparding resources in many ways, which is why it started development again after several months of zero activity, but unfortunately I don't have as much time as I would like. I care about bbPress, otherwise I wouldn't have spent as much time as I have already, and hopefully as some people leave (I can't believe you said you feel like a battered woman, the analogy feels completely inappropiate) others will join.

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

Posted 6 months ago #

@Matt

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!

frooyo
Member

Posted 6 months ago #

@Matt

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)

Posted 6 months ago #

"Even reading the blog, irc and this forum - it's still unclear to me what should be worked on for the next release."

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.

QuickD
Member

Posted 6 months ago #

The Drama continues

Posted 6 months ago #

@matt

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.

Nuul
Member

Posted 6 months ago #

"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. "

-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 :-(

Posted 6 months ago #

Hi Matt,

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.

Posted 6 months ago #

How about hiring or paying someone to manage the project? Or paying a developer? We had a paid developer/PM with sambauers, didn't we?

Posted 6 months ago #

Closing this thread, it has long left productive uses and is annoying me so much I just want to quit the whole project.

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