I missed the IRC meetup. š Very sorry about this — I didn’t set an alarm and the time just breezed by.
I set an alarm! Will see everyone next Wednesday.
In other news, the poll results are starting to firm up. Winners? Integration with WordPress far and away, followed by anonymous posting, WYSIWYG, and email notifications. We’re not going to follow these exactly, but it definitely gives us an idea of what people are most interested in and now we have to look behind the answers at what people mean when they say they want something. For example maybe rather than WYSIWYG we could bring over Oembed support from WordPress? I usually think of WYSIWYG more as a layout thing but a lot of people see it as the only way to include rich media. I’ll dig more into these.
Hi Matt,
I don’t think we really needed a poll to tell us WordPress Integration would win, its been the biggest tag in the cloud around here for the last 2 years. If i may add a caveat, that WordPress Integration might have less to do with people actually wanting to integrate with WP, and more to do with conflicting release cycles and the proof in some people’s eyes that the project hasn’t been abandoned/shelved/de-prioritised again (trying to pick a non-offensive phrasing there).
If WP integration is not one of the main consideration of BBpress, then BBpress administrators hit this odd “no-mans-land” every time WP gets an update. It can, and did, effectively appear to put the project in limbo for several times last year because of it.
WordPress strongly suggests that the best way to stay secure is to always have the latest version of WP installed, but when that doesn’t correlate with BBpress, we’re then left a choice we don’t want to make. Given that in the past 2 years we’ve had 5 versions of BBpress and 5 versions of WordPress, and only 2 combinations out of the 25 have integrated at any given time (though there was a hack to make 1 more combination work for a few months), WordPress integration has, whether rightly or wrongly, come to be seen a yardstick to gauge many things by.
Given that https://bbpress.org/documentation/integration-with-wordpress/ right there in the Features of BBpress website menu tell us “bbPress integration should work with most recent version of WordPress in the 2.5.x series. ” (which hasn’t been the most recent version of WordPress in 17 months) and then links to “how to integrate bbpress 09 with wordpress” (which hasn’t been the BBpress release in 6 months – yes, BBpress and WordPress didn’t play together for just under 11 months); there are a great number of us still walking on eggshells in regards to this project, probably unwilling to get behind it again until we’re relatively certain that BBpress isn’t just gathering dust, or going through a development spurt that will die off as soon as you hand the reins to someone else.
Constant, and continued WordPress integration – whether used by people or not – would be seen by many as a large step to proving that BBpress isn’t the White Rabbit to WordPress’ Alice.
Thanks for your time ( p.s. we all miss meetings sometimes, dont worry:] )
P.S. Given that i’m signed into BBpress, and yet not to this “blog” does that mean that BBpress.org website is not infact integrated to BBpress.org’s WordPress site? Thats a total aside, just found it curious. Thanks for your time.
Apologies for the second post, but just wanted to add that anonymous posting, WYSIWYG, and email notifications are all available via plugins that DO work with both 0.9 and 1.0.2. Funny that people are voting for features that they already have…
P.P.S Turns out when i’m signed into BBpress forums, i’m neither signed into the plugins section nor the blog. Not meaning to derail, just smiling at th irony of Integration being the number 1 voted feature (ahead of 3 features we already have working).
Again, thanks for your time, Kev
I agree about the WYSIWYG, it is more like a layout thing or for a CMS. I mean, how many bulletin boards have a WYSIWYG? I think what should be added instead is bbcode. Every forum uses it, and it’s quite known. If you really would like to add a WYSIWYG, then do this minimal (and NO tinymce) just ad tags like B I U S tags and no fancy tables or colors (those will destroy your template).
But this can be done plugin wise, so I think bbcode support instead would be a good enhancement for bbpress (and not hard to implement)
I haven’t heard about Oembed support, so after some googling, here some more info about it: http://oembed.com/
_Maurice
I agree with Maurice about the bbCode vs WYSIWYG editor.
And bbCode would be very easy to add into a plugin since it’s essentially just a series of shortcodes. In fact I recall seeing a plugin already that adds that functionality. The only tricky bit would be ensuring that tags auto-close themselves but I don’t that would be terribly difficult (and the plugin I mentioned may include that functionality already). It also wouldn’t put any real load on the server, since it’s just a matter of adding a few extra functions in to create the shortcodes.
Mike,
What’s all the Tek Talk about?
I third the bbcode instead of WYSIWYG (though I’d say to keep the WordPress convention and use HTML instead).
Maybe they’re thinking TinyMCE, though? Or the visual editor which … Eh, yeah.
I would be very surprised if they didn’t mean TinyMCE by ‘WYSIWYG’. After all, WordPress itself calls TinyMCE a WYSIWYG editor.
And I agree with this notion. I’d like to see a visual editor, even if it’s more limited than the total HTML control WordPress gives you. A bolted-down TinyMCE, so to speak.
WYSIWYG with TinyMCE is much better
I posted to this yesterday, not sure if it’s gone to the Spam Filter on the new WP2.9beta2…
But BBcode and Visual Editors are both in place already via plugins. In fact, “anonymous posting, WYSIWYG, and email notifications” are all availible as plugins that work with both 0.9 and 1.0.2.
BBcode in the core is understandable, not sure i’d use it, but i can see that ‘most’ forums allow it, and thus most users probably excpect it. Visual Editors, while something we techy folks may enjoy, isn’t something that the end user expects to be there.
Lets focus on what we need to make BBpress work for us administrators and then focus on what the needs (and not wants) of our end users are across the board. That will give us a platform from which to once again build up the BBpress community š
I like the suggestions posted here… I wouldn’t like to include TinyMCE because I simply can’t see the need for a WYSIWYG editor for a bulletin board. oEmbed would be a nice feature and easy to include when we decide to go with the WordPress integration route. If someone really needs TinyMCE… it can easily be included using a plugin.
I’d like to see a WYSIWYG editor of some sort, though I feel that something lighter than TinyMCE might be better. But maybe we should useTinyMCE for the sake of consistency with WP. In fact, if bbPress is going to become a WordPress plugin, then TinyMCE will be automatically available, won’t it?
Guys, the current out-of-the-box bbPress input system is way too bare. At a minimum there needs to be a built in buttons for people to easily bold, italicize, or underline text, and hyperlink stuff. (The ‘Allowed markup’ stuff is just not very appealing.)
Seriously, am I the only one who would rather have a standard built-in editor you can turn on or off instead of having to download tons of plugins like Allow Images, BBcode Buttons Toolbar, bbcode lite, bbpress smilies, or WYSIWYG editor? ‘Simple’ is a two way street in the sense that it is a pain to have to research, find, download and install zillions of plugins for B-A-S-I-C bulletin board features…and pray the plugins work!
The thing I do not like about bbPress is how reliant everyone/everything is on 3rd party plugins to do basic bulletin board stuff. This is a blessing for those of you who are minimalists but it is a curse for those who want bbPress to be a vBulletin killer. I dream of bbPress being more like feature-rich WordPress where more basic features are added to the Core and more plugins developed to flesh out those features even further.
I really don’t get the hangup re: an OPTIONAL (you can turn it on or off) WYSIWYG editor. It won’t break in future bbPress updates because its in the Core and if you don’t like it, simply turn if off. Blam, everyone is happy.
Plus additional plugins can be developed to spruce the editor up. Win win!
With vBulletin’s recent pricing scheme blunder bbPress has a chance to do to vBulletin what WordPress did to MovableType in 2004, but there need to be way more basic features in the core. I strongly believe standardizing stuff like bbPress’s input system will go a long way towards this goal.
Chris (GrassRootsPA),
You’ve answered your own question buddy.
“The thing I do not like about bbPress is how reliant everyone/everything is on 3rd party plugins to do basic bulletin board stuff. This is a blessing for those of you who are minimalists but it is a curse for those who want bbPress to be a vBulletin killer.”
This project never claims to be a vBulletin or phpBB killer. It does claim to be minamilist. Look at https://bbpress.org/about/ .
# I dream of bbPress being more like feature-rich WordPress where more basic features are added to the Core and more plugins developed to flesh out those features even further.”
See mate, you’re projecting your desires onto a product that in no way is going in the same dierction (and never has been). You want all these things that aren’t what BBpress is all about. Heck WordPress is actually a very bare product at the front end (for the user), so i’ve no idea why you think BBpress is going ot go the other way, especially when it says and has always said it wont (cunningly hidden on the About and Feature pages to avoid confusion).
“I really donāt get the hangup re: an OPTIONAL (you can turn it on or off) WYSIWYG editor. It wonāt break in future bbPress updates because its in the Core and if you donāt like it, simply turn if off. Blam, everyone is happy.”
Mostly because you already have that feature via a plugin. You can download it and turn it on š
Ther’s loads of reasons for this:
Its JavaScript reliant, usually on the latest version of a library that is outwith BBpress’s control.
The WYSIWYG editors are quite intesive for older machines and browsers – remember most of the world still uses dial up and IE; and if you remove North America from the statistics the percentage of 5-6 year old versions of Windows and usage of IE6 sky rockets. Why would we all get behind a feature will just cause problems throughout the world.
These things display differntly in every browser, and require a bucketload of testing all on their own. TinyMCE for example, has a testing/development team thats twice the size of BBpress.
We only have a limited amount of development time, why should something like a WYSIWYG edtor be developed by the BBpress team into the core when any idiot can add 3 lines of javascript code to their theme if they really want it? Why should the BBpress team take the responsability and time to bugfix that?
Why should users who came to this project based on the Philosophy in the About page have to turn off features that go against this philosophy simply because some people think they’re cool.
There’s already 2 working WYSIWYG plugins for BBpress. Neither of them are that popular based on downloads, less than 5 of the Top100 websites on CK’s list used them, so why should they be included in the core of plugins that are popular?
I build my custom WYSIWYG plugin in about 4 hours. Bug fixing took a few hours over the next weeks. If you really want it, you can use TinyMCE (3 lines of JS on your theme), one of the 2 existing plugins, or build your own like i did.
BBpress is build on certain principles mate, with a very limited development time (currently at 0hours from July 15th-Dec15th). Browser dependant interactive options for the user that administrators have to turn off just is nott part of the remit matey – especially when you have plugins that can do it already (and they aren’t popular).
@ Steve Bank:
“Thereās already 2 working WYSIWYG plugins for BBpress”
I currently have BBcode Buttons installed (https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bbcode-buttons/).
Tried Tiny MCE (3.2.5) (https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/tinymce/#post-4021) but there is no way to hyperlink things.
Are these the 2 you mean? Is there another program I’m missing? (I’m not a developer, just a newbie who taught himself how to muddle though WordPress and bbPress…am skeptical about my plugin development skills)
LOL, I certainly understand that bbPress is minimalist and not claiming to have everything but the kitchen sink. “Less (code) is more” “Simplicity is a feature”. But with vBulletin’s updated licensing costs there is going to be an opening for bbPress to be a vBulletin killer a la what WordPress did to MovableType in 2004. Just saying if bbPress got a little more feature-rich it would go a long way toward positioning itself as that alternative š
Steve, no need to be dogmatic, we’re in a brainstorming stage so all ideas are worth entertaining. We want to make bbPress accessible to people who can’t build their own WYSIWYG, like me. š We’re going to beef up core functionality to not be so reliant on plugins, and that’s not a bad thing.
Like so many others, I voted for more integration with WordPress. It would be a huge advantage to have things like shared search, the ability to display posts from either WordPress or bbPress on each other’s pages, common widgets, and logins always working across the two.
Regarding a WYSIWIG editor, I added very stripped down TinyMCE to a bbPress install I run on a site that has a very non-technical audience. It only has minimal buttons for basic features. The users absolutely loved it and are so happy they can do things they didn’t understand before. Even the plugins that gave buttons for inserting HTML or bbcode were too confusing because they inserted code into the text that didn’t mean anything to the audience. They just want to be able to visually make something bold, italic, or add a link. So adding Oembed support would not meet the need in that kind of scenario.
I’m really in favor of email notification that works – I’ve had no luck with the plugins. Anything to make the bb more sticky for my users.
@ Doug Smith:
Any chance you might offer the stripped down TinyMCE as a bbpress plugin?
I tried using another TinyMCE plugin someone else made but there was no hyperlink button built in.
Any chance you might offer the stripped down TinyMCE as a bbpress plugin?
I tried using another TinyMCE plugin someone else made but there was no hyperlink button built in.
I think an editor WYSIWYG editor is not very useful. Webmasters away from being original.
WordPress strongly suggests that the best way to stay secure is to always have the latest version of WP installed, but when that doesnāt correlate with BBpress, weāre then left a choice we donāt want to make. Given that in the past 2 years weāve had 5 versions of BBpress and 5 versions of WordPress, and only 2 combinations out of the 25 have integrated at any given time (though there was a hack to make 1 more combination work for a few months), WordPress integration has, whether rightly or wrongly, come to be seen a yardstick to gauge many things by.
Regarding a WYSIWIG editor, I added very stripped down TinyMCE to a bbPress install I run on a site that has a very non-technical audience. It only has minimal buttons for basic features. The users absolutely loved it and are so happy they can do things they didnāt understand before. Even the plugins that gave buttons for inserting HTML or bbcode were too confusing because they inserted code into the text that didnāt mean anything to the audience. They just want to be able to visually make something bold, italic, or add a link. So adding Oembed support would not meet the need in that kind of scenario.