Published on September 21st, 2011 by John James Jacoby
In hot pursuit of BuddyPress 1.5 follows bbPress 2.0!
No longer are the days of elaborate xml-rpc connections or impossible to figure-out cookie configurations! No more are the integration woes, complex theme arrangements, or separate dashboards! bbPress 2.0 represents a complete rethink of how to fit forums inside WordPress in the simplest, most elegant way possible.
Simply by activating bbPress 2.0, any standard WordPress theme is suddenly capable of having support forums, user profiles, topic tags, and custom topic views. Your users are able to mark topics as favorites to read them later, and can subscribe to be notified via email to topic replies, so they never miss out on the conversation.
bbPress 2.0 comes with Akismet and BuddyPress functionalities baked-in, so if you’re already using either plugin, no additional configuration is required.
If you already have a previous version installed, updating to 2.0 is easy with the bbPress Importer. Move your bbPress 1.0 powered content into your new WordPress/bbPress installation and you’re ready to go. (There is already a migration plugin in the works for other forum software that promises to be pretty amazing, too!)
If you’d like to see bbPress 2.0 in action, a few brave developers have been using it on their live sites already:
In the coming weeks we’ll be moving our own forums onto bbPress 2.0, adding a codex to improve the documentation, and doing some general housekeeping here at bbpress.org. We’ve put a lot of work into rebuilding the software, now it’s time to rebuild the site to properly support it!
Props for 2.0 go out to: andy, anointed, boonebgorges, christopher-jon, Coolkevman, cnorris23, dimadin, DJPaul, duck_, dudd, Fartlek, GautamGupta, greenshady, jaredatch, jghazally, Jason K, Kaspace, markmcwilliams, mouratidis, nacin, Nightgunner5, petemall, ryangannon, ryanimel, ramiy, scribu, schrepel, sorich87, vanillalounge, Viper007Bond, westi, and wonderboymusic.
Download bbPress 2.0
Available immediately is bbPress 2.0 RC 5 “Can we have a pool, dad?” edition. Thanks to a few last minute contributions we were able to fix some theme compatibility issues, BuddyPress Activity stream issues, and Email subscription issues. We’re pretty confident this is the final release-candidate before launch, so please update your existing installations and let us know how it’s going in the support forums.
We’re confident you can use RC 5 on a live site without sinking the ship, but please let us know if it springs any leaks in your installation. If you’re a developer or site administrator, report any oddities over at our trac.
Here are some of the changes in RC 5:
- Improved theme compatibility
- Improved BuddyPress Activity stream behavior
- Improved Subscription email sending
- API tweaks for plugin authors
Download bbPress 2.0 RC 5
Available immediately is bbPress 2.0 RC 4. Thanks to an enormous amount of feedback during the Beta period, we’ve put out a few unadvertised release candidates to tighten integration with Multisite, BuddyPress, and Akismet.
This is still pre-release software, but we think it’s polished and shiny enough to use on a live site. If you’re a developer or site administrator, please report any bugs you find as they are critical at this stage in development.
Check it out and let us know what you think in the support forums!
Here are some of the important changes:
- BuddyPress 1.5 activity streams and @mention integration
- Improved Akismet integration
- Improved update process
- Improved importer
- Improved multisite integration
- Improved spam/deleted user handling
- Added blacklist_keys support
- Added actions to topic/reply forms
- * Updated green admin color scheme for WordPress 3.2
Download bbPress 2.0 RC 4
* Bet you didn’t know this was there, did ya?
Available immediately is bbPress 2.0 Beta 3, chock full of fixes and enhancements to help smooth out the integration of bbPress into your existing WordPress.org powered site. Your feedback has been super helpful, and there’s been so much testing we think a sarcastic cake-promising robot may be involved somewhere.
You know the drill; this is still beta software, so don’t use it on your production sites. If you’re a plugin or theme developer, or a site administrator, run this only on test environments and report any bugs you find. If you’re a loyal bbPress user who’s anxious to see what the future of bbPress looks like, create a secondary WordPress test site and let us know what you think about it in the support forums. Extra points if you’re testing with WordPress Multisite.
So far we’re right on schedule for this to be the final beta before we start packaging release candidates, with bbPress 2.0 by the end of June (in tandem with WordPress 3.2.) The more you kick the tires and the more miles you put on Beta 3 means a more dependable, longer lasting bbPress 2.0, so put your testing gloves on and take it for a spin!
Here are some of the important changes since Beta 2:
- Akismet integration
- Fixes replies within wp-admin
- Fixes reply notification links
- Fixes inconsistent breadcrumb behavior
- Fixes theme compatibility issues
- Fixes archive and page conflicts
- Improvements to unpretty permalink support
- Improvements to importer
- Improvements to multisite support
- Normalize theme, shortcodes, and template parts
- Add humans.txt
- Add empty index.php files to prevent snooping
- Add max length to topic titles (default 80 chars)
- Add shortcodes for login, register, and lost password forms
- Add proper redirect handling to topics and replies, allowing them to live almost anywhere
- Add permalink collision warnings if custom slugs conflict
Download bbPress 2.0 Beta 3
Surprise! The development of bbPress 2.0 is progressing faster than expected! We released Beta 1 only six days ago, and today we’re releasing Beta 2. Huge props go out to everyone that’s already test driving Beta 1. The rapid pre-release cycle is due entirely to you, and sour cream and onion potato chips. 🙂
Remember that this is still very much beta software, so don’t go using it on your production sites. If you’re a plugin or theme developer, or a site administrator, you should be running this on test environments and reporting any bugs you find. If you’re a loyal bbPress user who is anxious to see what the future of bbPress looks like, create a secondary WordPress test site and let us know what you think about it in the support forums.
The plan is to keep releasing Beta’s as changes go in, put out release candidates in the next few weeks, and release bbPress 2.0 by the end of June (in tandem with WordPress 3.2.) The more you help us polish the new paint during the beta period means a shinier and longer lasting 2.0, and the more likely we are to stay on schedule and hit our release goals.
Here are some of the important changes since Beta 1:
- GlotPress integration
- Fixes Forum archive bug on some installations
- Fixes and improvements to importer
- Adds home link support to breadcrumb
- Adds missing breadcrumbs to various template files
- Adds filters for future anti-spam support
- Improvements to templates and CSS
- Improvements to Theme Compatibility
- Improved RTL support
- Improved multisite support
- Topic/reply trash fixes
Download bbPress 2.0 Beta 2
The next item up for bid is bbPress 2.0, Beta 1 – the first public iteration of bbPress as a plugin for your self hosted WordPress powered website. Several months worth of sweet-tea, BBQ, and pepperoni pizza have gone into making this the easiest forum software you could ever integrate with WordPress, and we’re really excited to give everyone a preview. The bidding, starts (and ends) at $free, for a quantity of unlimited bbPresses.
bbPress 2.0 is still in active development, and we don’t recommend that you run it on a production site. Instead, set up a test site or a local installation to play with. If you do manage to break it, you’ll be doing everyone a huge favor by letting us know. If you manage to fix what you broke on your own, there just might be cake waiting for you when the BBQ is gone. 🙂
We are aiming to release bbPress 2.0 by the end of June, to coincide with the WordPress 3.2 launch. The actual release date is a bit of a moving target, based on how both beta periods go. The more help we get with testing and fixing bugs, the sooner the final version ships. If you want to be a beta tester, check out the WordPress Codex article on how to report feedback.
Here’s a taste of the awesomesauce that comes baked in:
- Seamless integration with your WordPress site and theme
- Integrated admin interface for forums, topics, and replies
- Split and merge topics within a single forum
- Shortcodes to help you customize where your forums appear
- Currently comes with a child theme of TwentyTen to get you started
- Keep track of changes with topic and reply revisions
- Dashboard widget shows you a shapshot of your forums at a glance
- Automatically creates a new ‘Moderator’ role for your forums
- Mark topics as favorites and view them within your new user profile
- Receive emails when new replies are posted to topics you subscribe to
- Anonymous posting lets you open your community up to the world
- Includes widgets to show latest forum activity
- Comes with an importer to move your existing integrated forums over
Developers, here’s the icing on your cakes:
- Fully extendable, with actions and hooks where you need them
- Works with Multisite, so you really can have unlimited bbPresses
- Adds no additional database tables through the wonders of post types and taxonomies
- Uses adjustable meta capabilities for letting you scope out users and roles
- Relies on template parts to display themes in pieces that are meant to be overridden
- Fully documented PHP, so your IDE will thank you
- Plays nicely with BuddyPress Forums (full integration/replacement coming soon!)
- Use standard post queries to display custom forum and topic data
- Plays nicely with existing WordPress plugins (especially caching)
- It still uses the same awesome icons made by Ben Dunkle
You should know this going in:
- The migration tool is completely new, and really needs some in depth testing
- Query counts increase exponentially with hierarchical forums (fix pending)
- It’s possible to orphan topics/replies by deleting its parent forum (fix pending)
- If you have a physical /forums folder, your ‘forums’ slug will not work (needs nag)
If you think you found a bug, please report it! Start by bringing it up in the support forums, or if you’ve confirmed that other people are experiencing the same bug you can report it on the bbPress Core Trac. If you find a security vulnerability, please be discrete and let us know privately using one of the methods posted on the WordPress contact page.
Theme and plugin authors, if you haven’t been following the 2.0 development cycle, please start now so that you can update your themes and plugins to be compatible with this new version of bbPress.
Download bbPress 2.0, Beta 1 ↓
If you haven’t been keeping up with our progress over the past few months, you’re in for a treat. bbPress 1.0.3 is due out any day, as is 1.1 Release Candidate 1 which includes new features like email notification on follow-up posts and anonymous posting. There’s also a lot going on under the hood of the new WordPress plugin version of bbPress, and in an effort to get more people involved we’re bringing back the bi-weekly development chats in #bbpress on the freenode network on IRC.
In the past we’ve had a range of involvement, from developers to designers (to a totally empty channel.) 🙂 This time around I’d like to openly invite anyone that’s interested in getting in on the ground floor of development, testing, and theming the up-and-coming bbPress plugin to join us, and be part of building something crazy-super awesome.
We’re going to try to have them every other Wednesday at 4pm EST (UTC – 5) starting on February 23, 2011. If this time absolutely does not work for you and you really want to be there, post an alternative time in the comments and let’s figure something out that works for everyone.
Hope to see you then, and many fortnights to follow!
IRC log from the meetup on July 21, 2010
Read more →
I think WordPress integration is the most important item on the roadmap for the future of bbPress.
Why?
One, it’s an embarrassing pain in the butt to do now. One of the most frequent questions here on our forums. You have to jump through endless loops, and end up with something worse than most of the WP plugins for forums.
Two, we get the benefit of all the WordPress plugins and themes, which vastly outnumber our current options. Want private messaging? Use the BuddyPress plugin for it. Want OpenID? Stats? Sitemaps? There’s a plugin for that. Social network and profile features, in particular, are useful to the future of discussion forums and it’d be silly of us to duplicate that effort.
Three, it’ll be a lot more efficient because right now if you actually do get integration going you’re getting all of WordPress and all of BackPress loaded at once, which is a waste.
Four, it’ll make our development more efficient because we’ll be able to focus on the features that make discussions better, communities thrive, and bring bbPress into a new decade, because it still looks/works a lot like the oughts.
Five, we’ll be able to leverage the huge installed base of WordPress, over twelve million self-hosted sites at last count. More users of bbPress will also mean more developers, which will make our community much more robust. I believe that the majority of all websites on the internet are going to be running WordPress in the future, so it’s a good horse for us to hitch to.
Full, seamless integration with WordPress is something I’ve discussed for years. (Remember my dream of having each comment section being a mini-bbPress forum, complete with threads?) We’ve just taken a number of unfortunate detours (BackPress) on the way there.
IRC log from the meetup on January 13, 2010
Read more →
