There’s no way for me to contain either my excitement or anxiety when I say that bbPress 2.6.0 is available now! 🎉
This version of bbPress has been in development for just a bit under 6 years (yikes!) over which 420 tickets were resolved via 1737 individual code commits.
There are so many improvements that a changelog hardly seems fitting for this post, but the major features include per-forum moderation, a bunch of new platforms to import from, and an extensible engagements API that now powers the relationships between users, forums, topics, replies, subscriptions, and favorites.
At the time of this writing, bbPress is installed on approximately 336,000 WordPress installations, and is the most widely installed forum software in the world (according to BuiltWith.com and other sources.) Several of those are right here on bbPress.org, BuddyPress.org, and WordPress.org, the later of which includes a few dozen separate languages for non-English speaking communities of contributors all over the world.
The elephant in the room… the reason that 2.6.0 took so long, is pretty simple. bbPress has a small contributor pool, and none of us are 100% dedicated towards it. The project gets very little community feedback, which makes it hard to know if everything is working perfectly, or nobody is testing it at all.
So… 4 less-than part-time folks supporting over 300k sites, each with their own thousands of users, depending on us.
The pressure is high, and the chamber is echo’y, and as my own career has progressed these past 13 years, the numbers above make me increasingly nervous.
And the longer something takes to do is the higher the expectations are, and I personally locked up pretty hard multiple times on whether done was done enough to be trusted by so many having been tested by so few.
But… good things come to those who wait, and I’m sincerely sorry to have kept any of you waiting for too long.
bbPress 2.6.0 has been running smoothly on these forums since day 0. It’s stable, pretty, and a joy to use. We know you are gonna love it!
🐝💚
Thanks for all your hard work and commitment!
Thank you for making it possible. We really appreciate it!
394/5000
Great news, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. It’s nice how it would also enlarge this font because it is extremely small default on the forum. Also, see good ocpja, so that in the settings you can enter the text to be displayed on the forums (new, topics, reply, etc.) because many languages do not have a forum translated and so you could customize the forum to your own language.
Congratulations finally it’s out there! Been waiting for it for a while
Regarding small contributor pool, contributors lost interest as there was no solid progress noted on BBPress, Also users need to come forward and mark bugs and request features 🙂
I contributed on two tickets which made to 2.6, the tickets dated 2-3 years back but didn’t get recognition, 2900, 3078
it’s ok though.
I will try to contribute more
Yayy! Been waiting for this, specially because of the performance improvements for posting topics and replies in a large forum.
Gonna take me some time to test the update, and then actually go live with it.
Thanks a lot everyone involved for the hard work, hoping to start contributing to bbPress.
Welcome back, John!
You’ve done awesome work on bbPress project, bbPress 2.6 is just a new masterpiece! I believe that many contributors will join the party as long as the product becomes better and more popular. Keep up the high sprite, tomorrow gonna be a better day.
Thank you for updating this forum software. I have not tried out the update yet, but it’s nice to see an update regardless! I hope to see a “preview post” feature, since this is often requested at our forums.
Keep it up! 🙂
Thanks so much for all the hard work you put into bbPress all these years. I was floored to read about the update. Looking forward to checking everything out!
finally, it’s here !!
This is great news! Thank you for all your hard work. It’s really appreciated.
Thanks for the great update. I’ve been an user of bbPress and still recommends it to people, who want a simple forum solution for their WordPress website.
Thanks for your hard work!
Glad to see one of the first WordPress plugins that I ever used getting better. Thank you bbPress team for the great work you put in. 🙂
Bonkers. I’m a bigger fan. This is amazing and the work that four part-time people are doing should be shouted out even louder. This is truly a shining example in the WordPress space that deserves more praise and attention.
A big thank you to all who work on bbPress! The 2.6 release has so much good stuff. We’ve been running the betas even in production for quite a while now and it’s been performing well.
Thank you for updating this forum software
[…] bbPress 2.6 was released on November 12 after a little over six years in development. This new release includes per-forum moderation, new platforms to import from, and an extensible engagements API. You can read more about all of this in the bbPress codex. […]