bbPress.org

I just came across the original post announcing bbPress on my blog. It’s interesting to read back on that post and comments, like going back through a time warp.

Richard Boakes, one of the first users of Akismet, has a nice summary of the benefits of bbPress.

Jazzle says,  “bbPress is a fantastic example of how the web should be made.”

Since we dropped it last night, bbPress has had 289 downloads. (We’ll look at getting a counter up like we have for WP.) When you Google for bbPress there are about 340k hits.

We’ve now gone around the site, swept up the corners and shined the mantel. If you visited when things first launched you’ll notice everything is tidier now. Please take a look around! The forums are already starting to buzz.

I’m really excited about getting bbPress out in the public with its first public release. Michael has been doing great work and I think today, just as two years ago when I first wrote bbPress, the forum arena is in dire need of some fresh air.

bbPress is also technically pretty fun if you’re a geek. It’s how I would’ve written WordPress if I could go back in time with everything I know now. The code is clean, fast, consistent, and extensible.

The moment you’ve all been waiting for has arrived. bbPress has officially been released, and we’re calling it 0.72: Bix. 0.72 after WordPress’ auspicious beginnings, and Bix for Bix Beiderbecke‘s inspiring sound and really hep name.

We think this release is pretty swell, and we can only imagine you’ll have plenty to say about it. To that end, we’ve set up some forums to get the conversations going (and to show off the goods!).

Here’s just a few things that will catch your eye.

• Fast and Light: nothing you don’t need.
• Built in spam protection by Akismet.
• Really simple interface: we want people using our software to forget that they’re using it.
• Complete integration with WordPress.
• Both the look and the functionality are highly customizable.
• RSS feeds for everything.

So download and go!

There have been several changes at bbpress.org over the last couple weeks.

First off, the content of this site has been updated substantially. There is now somewhat more thorough documentation, and a more fleshed out about page.

Second, bbPress’ code has been made just that much more pluggable and convenient by syncing several of its core functions with those of WordPress.

Third, Bryan Veloso has whipped up some stylin’ new style for the bbPress default theme. People expect great things from Bryan, and, amazingly, he just keeps raising their expectations. Tips on how to create your own themes can be found in our Customization Documentation.

Fourth, the bbPress Trac has been moved to https://trac.bbpress.org/. The tickets have all been cleaned up to make way for…

Lastly, the imminent release of bbPress 0.72. Expect an announcement and some forums (no!) here on bbpress.org within the next couple of days.

Many of you will remember the dark days of the bbPress Trac. For several months it was getting hit by spammers multiple times a day.

Matt put a stop to new spam a couple of months ago, but there was still a huge amount of garbage blocking up our ticketing system. All of that is now gone. Well, I’m sure I missed some here and there.

This daunting task would have been completely impossible were it not for the following three things.

1. The Ticket Delete Plugin for trac by Noah Kantrowitz. The interface is clunky (limitations in the Trac plugin API?), but it gets the job done. Kills spam dead.
2. Jesse Ruderman‘s Check Range Greasemonkey script. This thing is awesome. Move over, sliced bread.
3. Tom Preuss. Many people helped reduce spammer damage by closing tickets and so forth, but Tom gets the gold star. His faithful invalidating of spam tickets through the darkest of bbPress’ days made searching for and eliminating trash a piece of cake. Many thanks to Tom and the others who stepped in.

If you’re looking to integrate bbPress and WordPress, life just got a little easier.

Keep reading for the long of it.

There have been a few template changes recently.

1. post-form.php should no longer have <form> opening or closing tags. These tags are included by the post_form() template tag.
2. Same for tag-form.php and tag_form().
3. edit_form() no longer needs any parameters.
4. login-failed.php has been moved to login.php.

I’ve done a quick pass over the bbPress API to clean up the obvious API oddities. I’ll also soon be looking for redundant actions and filters. This may break some of your plugins, but will hopefully make things easier for everyone in the end.

There will likely be quite a few changes over the next weeks. Look ahead to a better bbPress!

1. bb_add_user_favorite: used to pass one serialized array. Now passes two parameters.
2. bb_remove_user_favorite: same.
3. Action resolve_topic moved to after DB update.
4. Same for close_topic, stick_topic, unstick_topic.
5. Action opentopic moved to after DB update and renamed to open_topic.
6. Filter topic_resolution added: filters resolved status. Passes topic_id as an extra parameter.
7. bb_already_tagged: used to pass one serialized array. Now passes three parameters.
8. Same for bb_tag_added.
9. bb_tag_created: used to pass one parameter. Naw passes two. Order has changed.
10. bb_tag_removed: used to pass one serialzed array. Now renamed to bb_pre_tag_removed and passes three parameters.
11. Same with bb_tag_merged. Renamed to bb_pre_merge_tags.
12. bb_tag_destroyed renamed to bb_pre_destroy_tag.

I just checked in a new database layer that allows bbPress to connect to a completely separate database for its user information, in addition to just having custom table names. This is very useful if you want a bunch of blogs and forums running off the same user system, but don't want to stuff them in the same database, or if your user information is hosted on a different server or account than your forums are. 

Thanks in part to the hard work of Juan Correa (PotterSys) and Ryan Boren, bbPress is now almost completely "gettexted" which means that all of the strings in the software can be translated and replaced on the fly. Some other code improvements have also come along the way.

All SVN changes are now being mailed to our mailing list and I've also fixed up the nightly builds so they're generating correctly now.