I think WordPress integration is the most important item on the roadmap for the future of bbPress.
Why?
One, it’s an embarrassing pain in the butt to do now. One of the most frequent questions here on our forums. You have to jump through endless loops, and end up with something worse than most of the WP plugins for forums.
Two, we get the benefit of all the WordPress plugins and themes, which vastly outnumber our current options. Want private messaging? Use the BuddyPress plugin for it. Want OpenID? Stats? Sitemaps? There’s a plugin for that. Social network and profile features, in particular, are useful to the future of discussion forums and it’d be silly of us to duplicate that effort.
Three, it’ll be a lot more efficient because right now if you actually do get integration going you’re getting all of WordPress and all of BackPress loaded at once, which is a waste.
Four, it’ll make our development more efficient because we’ll be able to focus on the features that make discussions better, communities thrive, and bring bbPress into a new decade, because it still looks/works a lot like the oughts.
Five, we’ll be able to leverage the huge installed base of WordPress, over twelve million self-hosted sites at last count. More users of bbPress will also mean more developers, which will make our community much more robust. I believe that the majority of all websites on the internet are going to be running WordPress in the future, so it’s a good horse for us to hitch to.
Full, seamless integration with WordPress is something I’ve discussed for years. (Remember my dream of having each comment section being a mini-bbPress forum, complete with threads?) We’ve just taken a number of unfortunate detours (BackPress) on the way there.
Isn’t WordPress already integrated with WordPress MU?
Yep.
Any timeline on this? I’ve struggled with this sort of functionality many many times. The forum plugins out there aren’t all up to spec either. bbPress integration would be wonderful.
Not yet, but will update the blog when we have more info.
that’s a great idea but WordPress needs to be more prepared for plugins and not just hacks. I’m a Joomla developer and the freamwork there, surely is a piece of art. not just the codeing but the concept of thinking ahead for things might needed next.
For WordPress, it is kind of hard to follow the real code lines and find the good documentation.
I haven’t checked out Joomla in a few years but I’ll give it another look. We’re both Open Source and it’s always good to learn from other people’s experience.
I can’t wait for bbPress to become a plugin and get all the benefits of WordPress.
Getting ready to update a WP/bb site soon, hopefully it will be the last time I have to build match WordPress and bbPress themes! More than anything, I’m looking forward to site-wide menus and widgets without hard coding anything or a bunch of extra overhead.
It’d be interesting to see what P3 with a bbPress plugin would look like.
Actually, theme integration doesn’t need a full load of both CMSes necessarily. I use PixoPoint Theme Integrator for WordPress, a bit of CSS tweaks and you’re up and running! 🙂 Anyway I agree with all the rest of the post. Very interesting. 😉
Yup, I’ve never used bbpress because it was so annoying to install :< And there are much better standalone forums anyways, so I've gone with them.
If it were to be a plugin that would be MUCH simpler and more convenient.
Sorry it didn’t work for you before, hopefully we can win you back.
OK, but why we don’t have different name for plugin. People will be confused, we will have a situation like wp.org vs wp.com?
When we will have 1.1 released? Chris made commits last months that fixed many issued so I don’t understand why we can’t have a new version. And why we won’t get a new version of stable bbPress until there are commits for it.
Have you ever look at this? Well, simply click over red “Download” button in top right corner here. It’s embarrising. It’s been three months since redesign. There is no excuse for this.
This happens only if you have a deep integration, not if you only connect users database
Will fix up the download button right away, I had seen it before but thought it was a problem with my internet connection.
The name is going to be the same because this is my original vision for bbPress.
1.1 — we’ll see, it’s good to have community attention on it again. I will take responsibility here because I think I got some emails about it that got buried in my inbox.
In terms of deep integration, that’s the only kind of integration that matters. What use is it connecting your user tables if you have to do an entirely new version of your theme and all your plugins to make the site look the same.
Ups, I forgot a link in “Have you ever look at this“.
One of the reasons I decided AGAINST bbPress was the complicated setup involved. BuddyPress is a decent alternative, albeit chaotic for most people (they’ll choose Facebook first).
My only request is that if you do decide to have bbPress included as a plugin, could you pretty please make it so we can install it at example.com/forum instead of forum.example.com?
Just a suggestion!
Absolutely, you should be able to turn any “page” in WordPress into a bbPress forum, and optionally have the comment section of every post be a mini-forum.
Yeah this is a long time coming… Justin Tadlock just did a post on a plugin using custom post types to build a forum: http://j.mp/bcyXzI
Otherwise I’d like to see bbpress using custom post types and be integrated into that
When bbPress is integrated and becomes built as a plugin for WordPress it will be absolutely wonderful.
BTW very nice green color change! My cuppa…
Six, we would get shared search across WP and bb.
@Matt
There must be 1/2 dozen forum plugins for WordPress already.
Why then not tell the bbPress uses to just use SimplePress, of one of the other existing forum plugins?
We should probably reach out to the existing plugins and see if they want to join our effort — the idea is to have something official we can point people to, a canonical forum solution for WordPress.
I think this is a bad solution. The only forum plugin that´s developed continously is SimplePress. But this is really overbloated for most projects. The other plugins are not developed continously. Latest example: Mingle-Forum Plugin. The author thinks about to make it a premium plugin. I guess that this is the end of the free version. In this case most of it´s users search for an alternative. This seems to be an eternal cycle. First there was wp-forum. Then came forum-server and now there´s mingle-forum. What´s next? I (and i guess many more Users) don´t want to exchange the used forum plugin every 2 or 3 month just because the development has stopped… We need one forum plugin that is simple, fast and official.
Yes! And before someone comments how search sucks, check out the Sphinx stuff for WP.
Seamless WordPress/bbPress integration is essential for the success of bbPress. Most people use forums as a portion of the website and bbPress is just about perfect for that except for the integration hassle. I wish this will be fixed very soon. Thanks Matt!
Thanks for the post Matt. There are many in the bbPress community who will appreciate it.
The following comment particularly caught my attention as I don’t recall hearing you refer to the use of BackPress as an error previously:
What’s up with the lack of styling on here? I just made a blockquote and it looks any other chunk of text. And there’s no Gravatars either …
[…] read: WordPress integration […]
The ONLY reason I am against it is because bbpress replies are likely to become custom post_types. I like having separate tables for the forum stuff, makes it so much easier to know what is what and where.
Threads could be posts and replies could be comments… let’s see what the team decides is best.
[…] Two, we get the benefit of all the WordPress plugins and themes, which vastly outnumber our current options. Want private messaging? Use the BuddyPress plugin for it. Want OpenID? Stats? Sitemaps? There’s a plugin for that. Social network and profile features, in particular, are useful to the future of discussion forums and it’d be silly of us to duplicate that effort. (Official bbPress Blog) […]
It seems like it would be much easier at this point with WP 3.0. A forum thread would essentially be a custom post type, would it not?
That’s the idea.
When would this be available? is there a target date for a beta?
Great news, I can’t wait for this! Finally! 🙂
Any timeline on this?
No definite plans yet. 🙂
WP is one of the best things to happen to the Web, ever, and it’s high time that it integrated a good discussion forum. Good on ya for heading in this direction. I hope the release comes sooner rather than later. I’m ready. I’ve got clients ready for this. I’m not one of the people troubled by your naming decision for the plugin, but then I’ve never installed or depended on bbpress standalone.
[…] was released 1 year ago! Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, was only recently updated bbPress blog, 7 months 2 days since his last […]
Think it’s a great idea. But…
Feels like the wp community is looking to much within it’s own universe.
Wouldn’t it be a great idea to make it extremely easy for other open source (forum) software to hook into wp?
I’m going to install bbpress now and that wil create data (users & information) that’s a standalone from the regular wp website. Please make it easy to migrate the information and the users of the bbpress installation to wp.
Matt, great to see attention on bbPress again!
How about an importer from the most popular forum software currently, vBulletin – just like wordpress has for so many other systems to welcome existing sites to move over.
There are many of us with established vBulletin forums that would migrate if there was only a way to do so… I would love to move our vBulletin Forums to bbPress + a real BuddyPress community + WordPressMU!
When do you think that may be possible?
* the importer would just need to keep the URL structure or create a list of redirects for .htaccess so the forum site being migrated doesn’t lose all the search engine ranking it’s built up over the years. 🙂
Thanks!
Dan
Let’s wait until the bbPress plugin is available before we start making grand feature requests 😉
Matt, I’m getting close to launching a project (in about three weeks) I’ve been working on for several months now, and I’ve been keeping an eye on the bbpress integration all along. It certainly seems worth waiting for, and I don’t mind taking my site live without a forum if bbpress is coming along relatively soon afterward. I know you’ve said you don’t have a specific timeline, but can you offer some general idea about the scope of time – ie, months, a year, that sort of thing?
I’m not trying to be pushy at all. It just sounds like an integrated bbpress is going to be the best solution to creating a forum on a wordpress-based site, and if it’s going to be available in the relatively near future, I want to make sure it’s part of my plans.
Thanks for being so willing to discuss it with us.
Yours,
Robert
[…] was released 1 year ago! Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, was only recently updated bbPress blog, 7 months 2 days since his last […]
Please please work on this asap. I would love to use bbPress in an easier way. Would private messaging be included as well? I could never get the plugin for it to work, so an official solution to it would be great.
It’s good to see bbPress getting some much needed attention. As a designer and front-end developer I look forward to the day when bbPress is mature enough to actually deploy for clients.
I would love to see a fully integrated bbpress plugin, i have been theme bbpress a few times and find it would be great to have it integrated with WP, would save a lot of trouble and improve the system, a singular admin panel would make it all worth it, Buddypress is outstanding and I’m sure bbpress will be a great addition to WP.
I look forward to updates on bbpress plugin.
Have you thought about working with teams like Disqus or IntenseDebate? To me, the work they have done on comments systems are break-through, and the notion of a common system for cross posting of forums and comments is killer (as in “let’s take this conversation to it’s own room”, or “there’s a room for that” sort of functionality).
A broad gauge timeline would be greatly appreciated, to help the community calibrate on how much customization they invest in now.
This post is great. I can’t wait for the bbPress to become a plugin. When that happens, it will be totally superb. Way to go.
Knowing that bbpress and wordpress would be fully integrated sometime soon we selected bbpress for airportforums.co.uk. However, the usability needs some work and I hope this will be done as part of WP integration… registration without choosing password is a pain and not having “register” button on add reply page doesn’t make sense.
Are changes like this part of the WP integration?
After deciding to build a series of websites with WordPress and BuddyPress, I started looking into forum add-ons to extend the discussion possibilities beyond comments and the BP “groups”. vBulletin is the industry standard, apparently, although after weighing all the benefits and drawbacks of VB/BBP, I’ve decided to go with bbPress and will wait for the plug-in version to be released. The main reason being the specific purpose of deep integration between bbPress and WordPress.
My question is whether there will be deep cross-functionality and customization implemented between bbPress, the WordPress comments, and BuddyPress? I am very interested in the forums page being the center of discussion for the site, with blog comments and BuddyPress groups being feeders to the forum. Also, any chance for an update as far as estimated timeline for stable release for plug-in version of bbPress?
Thanks for all you guys do, I try to always remind myself that this amazing software is free, and most of the work is done by volunteers! Thanks!
I just dream about the day, when bbPress is a fully integrated WP-plugin.
Integrating bbpress & wordpress has been the biggest PITA. I’ve followed every tutorial I can find, reinstalled a dozen times and it has yet to work perfectly (you can only logout wherever you logged in). Hopefully better/easier integration will come SOON because I love the idea of a bbpress/WP combo, but it’s almost not worth the hassle.
Looking forward to updates!
[…] moment its currently designed to run very much as a standalone application; however according to this meeting, its not likely to stay that […]
Certainly demand for forum integration with WordPress seems to be picking up here in Australia. bbPress fulfils most of the needs of people wanting integration with WordPress Websites so the continued development of bbPress with integration is very welcome!
That would be awesome. I’ve used Buddypress on many of my sites before.