Re: Support for 0.9 – how long?
If I missed such a large site in the top 100 be sure to let me know.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to find certain sites given how much bbPress is being customized.
(I had written a whole thing here but I accidentally closed the tab and restoring it never brought the text back unfortunately.)
You should never adopt a program based on one person, especially if that person doesn’t do it for a living and even more important since that person doesn’t work for the company that made the program in the first place 
To be clear I am not abandoning bbPress, at least not until I find something better and I am not actually looking for something else right now and what I have seen over the past year has not impressed me much. Besides, there are other talents around here and they are slowing releasing more and more impressive plugins or porting them from WP. A couple years from now people won’t even remember me.
My biggest problem with 1.0 is how bbPress was on a course with 0.9 to correct many of the legacy mistakes that WordPress had made, and suddenly with a whim by Matt, bbPress has turned around 180 degrees and steered itself neck deep back into the muck and mire via BackPress. It’s now burdened with many more layers and required compatibility and it will never be any more lightweight than it is now, which is not so fantastic anymore.
Another big problem growing with 1.0 is how instead of taking any feature that is outside of the API functionality and making it external as a plugin, it is being poured directly into the core, setting itself up for more legacy failure, like WordPress. Sam wrote some really great plugins as an independent but now as a core developer he can just slide it right into the core. It’s far easier to modified the core to get new features done fast but it should be resisted at all costs. You’ll notice that WordPress doesn’t have any official plugins outside of akismet and “hello dolly”, it’s a very clear but invisible company policy – “we don’t make plugins, put it into the core”. bbPress is now headed down the same path and it’s not necessary.
Things like:
gravatars
voices
topic page icons
should not be in the core. Instead any necessary action and filter hooks needed to accomplish such features should be carefully created and then the features should be made as plugins that can be enabled or disabled as desired. bbPress already comes with a “factory” plugin directory, it should be put to good use.
bbPress 0.9’s greatest strength was as a lightweight framework.
1.0 is not just a framework anymore, it’s starting to tell you how it should look and feel, and that is bad, because there are dozens of other forum programs out there that will do just that.
