Reply To: My impressions so far
That ‘warning system’ will remain plugin territory for a while even though I have a specific use case that this is important for it, it will still remain that way for a while, just because the functionality CAN be performed does not explicitly mean that it should be included with bbPress core.
As I mentioned above ‘Featured Plugins’ will most likely evolve to become a more refined list and the power and flexibility of bbPress allows us to do this without forcing/giving every user the ‘kitchen sink’ just because we can.
“bbPress is forum software, made the WordPress way.” and just like WordPress’ philosophy we are making “Decisions, Not Options”. And for example this decision extends to user profile custom fields, if you want these for post authors in WordPress, you look to a custom function or plugin, bbPress is the same, a custom function or a plugin.
bbPress utilizes WordPress Template Hierarchy to allow sites, theme authors and plugin developers to make amazing forum sites powered by bbPress and simply creating a set of pages that work with all the themes out there is not a one size fits all, some themes use tables, some divs, some unordered lists, responsive, non responsive, the combinations are endless and as said we try our best to ensure template compatability but removing the flexability just to limit designers and developers to no longer have these options available to them is something I doubt we will change for quite a while. We would like to include an additional set of default templates in bbPress, but that’s another project we just have not got to yet, bbPress already fully supports numerous templates though currently it only ships with one set.
I come from a phpBB background and have spend many weeks in ‘other’ forums databases whilst supporting the ~25 importers included with bbPress, the current way the WordPress database schema is structured is partially a limitation on what options we have available to us and still keep bbPress light and compact without adding new tables to the database.
