bbPress.org

I’ve had a check-out for a while, but nothing of his has made it in yet.

Because there are only so many ways to do the same thing, our code is very similar with a few different methods here and there. His code is more mature in a few areas (mapping WordPress meta capabilities, topic/reply counts, additional query caching…) and it’s almost time to cherry pick his code and give props where due.

He started out using taxonomies for forums, but a lack of taxonomy meta thwarted that idea. We talked before either of us made too much progress on how to best do things so we would be loosely compatible with each other. I committed early on to using post types for data storage for everything to allow for easy forward compatibility with things like forum/topic/reply thumbnails, excerpts, revisions, etc… Justin and I both agreed it was the quickest way to go, we put our noses down and wrote some code, and we met a month or two ago in #bbpress on IRC and exchanged more code and ideas.

It was really cool for Justin to volunteer to share his code and approach. He spent countless hours getting things dialed in and that time is going to be greatly appreciated real soon.

It would have been even cooler to have him contribute patches directly to trac, but from what I recall of our talks he had some previous obligations that prevented it. I’m sure if I’m wrong Justin will catch wind and chime in.

Edit: I saw a reply in the above linked topic about him ‘turning over’ code to bbPress, but I don’t really see it like that. His code is always his, and he’s free to continue developing his plugin if he wanted to. No hard feelings.

The bbPress trac is public and the code is visible for everyone to see, versus Justin’s forum code which to my understanding isn’t something he wants openly available for download, or else I imagine he’d probably have it that way. I know from experience that supporting something as large as bbPress on top of other obligations can be a challenge, so I wouldn’t blame him for not wanting to volunteer additional time.

Either way I’m honored to have his respect and be able to have someone attempting to do something similar at the same time. It’s one of the first times in my professional career I’ve had what most people would consider ‘friendly competition’ without ever feeling like we were against each other in any way… not that I’ve ever had unfriendly competition… but you get the idea.