The next item up for bid is bbPress 2.0, Beta 1 – the first public iteration of bbPress as a plugin for your self hosted WordPress powered website. Several months worth of sweet-tea, BBQ, and pepperoni pizza have gone into making this the easiest forum software you could ever integrate with WordPress, and we’re really excited to give everyone a preview. The bidding, starts (and ends) at $free, for a quantity of unlimited bbPresses.

bbPress 2.0 is still in active development, and we don’t recommend that you run it on a production site. Instead, set up a test site or a local installation to play with. If you do manage to break it, you’ll be doing everyone a huge favor by letting us know. If you manage to fix what you broke on your own, there just might be cake waiting for you when the BBQ is gone. 🙂

We are aiming to release bbPress 2.0 by the end of June, to coincide with the WordPress 3.2 launch. The actual release date is a bit of a moving target, based on how both beta periods go. The more help we get with testing and fixing bugs, the sooner the final version ships. If you want to be a beta tester, check out the WordPress Codex article on how to report feedback.

Here’s a taste of the awesomesauce that comes baked in:

  • Seamless integration with your WordPress site and theme
  • Integrated admin interface for forums, topics, and replies
  • Split and merge topics within a single forum
  • Shortcodes to help you customize where your forums appear
  • Currently comes with a child theme of TwentyTen to get you started
  • Keep track of changes with topic and reply revisions
  • Dashboard widget shows you a shapshot of your forums at a glance
  • Automatically creates a new ‘Moderator’ role for your forums
  • Mark topics as favorites and view them within your new user profile
  • Receive emails when new replies are posted to topics you subscribe to
  • Anonymous posting lets you open your community up to the world
  • Includes widgets to show latest forum activity
  • Comes with an importer to move your existing integrated forums over

Developers, here’s the icing on your cakes:

  • Fully extendable, with actions and hooks where you need them
  • Works with Multisite, so you really can have unlimited bbPresses
  • Adds no additional database tables through the wonders of post types and taxonomies
  • Uses adjustable meta capabilities for letting you scope out users and roles
  • Relies on template parts to display themes in pieces that are meant to be overridden
  • Fully documented PHP, so your IDE will thank you
  • Plays nicely with BuddyPress Forums (full integration/replacement coming soon!)
  • Use standard post queries to display custom forum and topic data
  • Plays nicely with existing WordPress plugins (especially caching)
  • It still uses the same awesome icons made by Ben Dunkle

You should know this going in:

  • The migration tool is completely new, and really needs some in depth testing
  • Query counts increase exponentially with hierarchical forums (fix pending)
  • It’s possible to orphan topics/replies by deleting its parent forum (fix pending)
  • If you have a physical /forums folder, your ‘forums’ slug will not work (needs nag)

If you think you found a bug, please report it! Start by bringing it up in the support forums, or if you’ve confirmed that other people are experiencing the same bug you can report it on the bbPress Core Trac. If you find a security vulnerability, please be discrete and let us know privately using one of the methods posted on the WordPress contact page.

Theme and plugin authors, if you haven’t been following the 2.0 development cycle, please start now so that you can update your themes and plugins to be compatible with this new version of bbPress.

Download bbPress 2.0, Beta 1 ↓