bbPress.org

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.

Details and Upgrade Instructions

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.

Hierarchical Forums

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.

“Slug” based permalinks

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).

Plugin Management

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.

A few small things

Here a sampling of some of the other minor changes in bbPress 0.8.2.

• More tag cloud formatting options
• Improved consistency in tagging
• bbPress’ default Kakumei theme combines the list of “Your Tags” and “Others’ Tags”.
• No more annoying feed: before all of your RSS feed links. The feed: psuedo-standard was a clever idea, but never really caught on.
• Moderators and Admins are considered “trusted” and will never have their posts marked as spam.
• Admins can change other user’s passwords.
• More filters and actions for plugin authors
• Faster database queries

Upgrade instructions and techy info

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.

Read more →

Timezones

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.

Template Functions

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().

• By default, these functions output time formatted like “7 hours” as in “7 hours ago”.
• You can specify a different format by using a PHP date format string:

  bb_post_time( 'F j, Y, h:i A' )

  -> “February 8, 2007, 10:57 PM”

• A lot of bbPress’ default templates used to do strange things like

  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.

• For you plugin developers, you can also easily grab the Unix timestamp: 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):

• Forum deletion
• Multibyte tags
• Custom locations for themes, plugins and config.php
• Multiple theme support

there’s a couple new ones that are among our most frequently requested:

• Better timezone support; You’re no longer restricted to showing all your times in the timezone of your server (what an odd requirement that was)
• Whitespace preservation of `backticked` <code> blocks.

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.

bbPress has seen some pretty interesting development over the past weeks. Just to keep people in the know, and since many were expecting bbPress 0.80 to come out a couple weeks ago (we’re still learning here 🙂 ), here’s a short list of some new features that will be in the next release.

• Better support for right-to-left languages.
• Some better backend support for search queries.
• Removal of the topic_resolved column from the database. No more “this topic is not a support question” strangeness for forums that aren’t support forums. Those people that want to keep such functionality around will be very pleased with Aditya’s Support Forum plugin.
• The ability to delete forums. (No!) Yes!
• Tags that are multibyte aware (you’ll be able to tag in Japanese).
• Multiple theme support. You’ll be able to upload a bunch of themes and select which one you want from the Admin panels.
• A more pluggable database class and user system.
• Anywhere-you-want-them plugins directory, templates directory, and config.php. This is pretty nice; you’ll be able install a completely “clean” copy of bbPress in, for example, a directory named public_html/forums/ and have your templates stored in public_html/templates/, your plugins stored in public_html/plugins/ and your config.php file in public_html/config.php. None of your custom stuff ever has to be in bbPress’ public_html/forums/ directory, so upgrades will be a snap.

Of course, we’re still working out some bugs and have a few more important things to get done before the next release, but that’s a preview of things to come.

For those of you interested in keping closer tabs on bbPress development, we now offer a new bbPress Trac Mailing List. Subscribers to this “read-only” list will receive an email every time a ticket on bbPress’ development center is changed. I tried generating an RSS feed for such changes, but my Trac-fu is pretty poor. So, email it is.

The original bbPress Development list is still around, of course, for discussions and ideas.

Sign up for both!

Because of a PHP bug, we recently discovered that a small number of bbPress users are prone to a security vulnerability. Only users of certain versions of PHP and with certain server configurations are at risk, but encourage everyone to upgrade to the newly released bbPress 0.75 regardless.

Get downloadin’!

To see what’s new, check out the lists of tickets closed and code changed.