WordPress 2.3 is now available.
I mention that because the current version of bbPress (version 0.8.2) is not compatible with WordPress 2.3 if you are loading both scripts at the same time. If you’re not loading both scripts at the same time, everything is fine.
A new version of bbPress will be coming out in a day or two as soon as we get done testing it, and that version will fully compatible with the latest version of WordPress once again.
bbPress has twenty or so functions that select groups of topics or posts from the database. Some of them do very specific things, and some of them do something only slightly different from another such function.
Maintaining this large group of functions and keeping them all consistent was beginning to become a nuisance. Additionally, it was annoying to have either to write a whole new function or to hack filters into and onto an existing function every time a new database query was needed.
To help alleviate both of these problems, the next version of bbPress will come with a BB_Query class, which all of the above referenced functions will use.
bbPress 0.8.2 introduced a new way of counting how many pages worth of information there were to display (how many pages worth of content, for example, there are to display in a user’s profile): MySQL’s FOUND_ROWS() function. It works very well for most bbPress sites.
It cripples large sites.
As awkward as it is to issue a new release less than 24 hours after the previous one, here it is: bbPress 0.8.2.1.
We recommend all users download and upgrade now.
A new release! bbPress 0.8.2 has a quite a few changes and features. While you’re downloading, check out the cool new stuff.
Forums can now be grouped hierarchically (that is, forums can have “children”). To organize your forums, go to Content -> Forums in your bbPress’ admin panels, click “Edit Forum Order” and drag the rows around: up, down, left and right.
Make sure to “Save Forum Order” when you’re done.
No longer are you constrained to topics and forums with permalinks that look like http://example.com/topic/14/. By turning on slug based permalinks, your URLs will be generated from the forum’s or topic’s title like http://example.com/topic/see-you-in-hawaii/.
Also, all of bbPress’ different permalink structures (/topic.php?id=14, /topic/14/, /topic/see-you-in-hawaii/) are interchangeable; you can switch to whichever structure you like and all your old links will still work (but see the upgrade instructions in this post).
Plugins can now be activated and deactivated with the click of the mouse in bbPress 0.8.2. Just go to Site Management -> Plugins in your bbPress’ admin panels. To be activated, however, every plugin must have a “plugin header” that includes at least the plugin’s name. Here’s an example.
/*
Plugin Name: Name of your plugin required
Plugin URI: Plugin's website
Description: Short description of your plugin
Author: Your name
Author URI: Your website
Version: Current version number of your plugin
*/
As a bonus, “hidden” feature, plugins whose file name begins with an underscore (_) do not need to be activated; they will be loaded automatically and do not require a plugin header.
Here a sampling of some of the other minor changes in bbPress 0.8.2.
feed: before all of your RSS feed links. The feed: psuedo-standard was a clever idea, but never really caught on.The meetup yesterday was really enjoyable, lot’s of good ideas about how bbPress is going to evolve in the future. Doug Stewart has a pretty thorough write-up of the night, including the movie interlude afterward. Hopefully like R. Kelly, bbPress development will no longer be trapped in the closet.
As Matt points out, he and I will be at San Francisco’s Chaat Cafe for the first (EV4R!) bbPress meetup on the evening of Monday, June 11th.
I’m excited to meet Sam Bauers and Doug Stewart (who are the catalysts for the meetup) in person and all of the rest of you who can make it.
w00t!
Perhaps more excitingly, this blog (and bbPress itself) will see much more frequent updates in the near future. Good times ahead.
A small security and bug fixing release, bbPress 0.8.1 is now available for download.
Historically, bbPress has dealt with time in a… shall we say “interesting” manner. Without going into technical details, bbPress constrained you, the person installing bbPress, to set it’s internal timezone to match exactly that of the server it was running on.
That’s ridiculous.
What if you lived in Brisbane, but your servers were held captive in Cleveland and set to GMT? I’ll tell you what if: only after lots of trial and error were you able to get rid of that strange “-1 years ago” bug seen everywhere on your site. But then you were stuck at some arbitrary timezone.
With bbPress 0.8, all that has changed. You can set bbPress’ timezone to anything you like completely independent of where you are and where your server is.
But that’s not good enough, you cry! You want your users to be able to set their own timezones too! Well, bbPress doesn’t do that, and may never, but a plugin can and does! See the “proof-of-concept” User Timezones plugin.
Additionally, theme designing and tweaking is now much easier with respect to time template functions like bb_post_time(), topic_time(), and topic_start_time().
bb_post_time( 'F j, Y, h:i A' )-> “February 8, 2007, 10:57 PM”
bb_since( strtotime( bb_get_post_time() ) ) or something equally heinous. No longer. All the default templates now use the much more pleasant method described above. If you based any custom templates off of the old default templates, they will probably still work since the changes made were almost completely backward compatible. If you run into any problems, remove from your templates any mention of strtotime(), bb_since(), and bb_offset_time() as the bits you need from those functions should now work automagically.
bb_get_post_time( 'timestamp' ), and the MySQL date: bb_get_post_time( 'mysql' ).Much more pleasant 🙂
After some “last minute” bug squashing, here we are: another new bbPress release ready for download. bbPress “Desmond” 0.8.
In addition to some features we already mentioned on the blog (here’s a few to recap):
there’s a couple new ones that are among our most frequently requested:
Upgrade Note: Your custom templates and stylesheets must now be placed in a sub-directory of my-templates/ rather than in that directory directly. Try putting your files in something like my-templates/my-hot-theme/ then selecting your theme from your bbPress’ Presentation Admin panel.
To get into the nitty gritty about what’s changed, here’s a list of tickets closed and two of code changed [2] (I couldn’t get trac to show them all on one page there’s so many!).
Translators can download the POT file for bbPress 0.8.
