bbPress.org

bbPress.org went through a serious clean-up effort in 2012. The site now runs a minimal set of plugins, with an emphasis on supporting the project proper and showcasing it in a much more subtle and focused way.

bbPress.org’s plugin repository was retired, and all new plugins are located in WordPress.org extend. This makes perfect sense right now, and really goes a long way towards more tightly integrating the WordPress/bbPress ecosystems together.

bbPress Releases

bbPress saw the release of 2.1 and 2.2 this year, both major versions that included some pretty nifty and progressive features, such as: retina support, theme compatibility, multiple user roles, private/hidden forums, BuddyPress integration, Akismet integration, and improved multisite support.

bbPress recently welcomed Jennifer M. Dodd as a core committer, and she’s already doing great. We’ve also started doing weekly team chats, and have regulars that are helping run the show, triage trac, and follow closely inline with the successes of WordPress core.

In 2013, bbPress will see:

  • Forum specific searching.
  • More BuddyPress integration.
  • More migrations to 2.x in the various .org usages.
  • Performance improvements around recalculating metadata.
  • Improved capability mapping, to allow more granular access control.
  • Hopefully, another core committer.

In closing

2012 has been a great year for the bb’s. The community is really rallying behind bbPress again, and our BuddyPress users are anxiously awaiting the 1.7 release to alleviate all of their theming woes. Overall, I’m very proud about what we were able to accomplish this year, and am excited about what we have planned for 2013.