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
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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
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IRC log from the 6 January 2010 meetup.
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IRC log from the 30 December 2009 meetup.
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What, just because it’s two days before Christmas we can’t rock the bbPress? In summary: anonymous comments from filosofo and email from photomatt (me) on deck, bug fixes to make things sing, PeteMall will be directly committing fixes, and hajii will be bug gardening.
Meetup log after the jump:
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I missed the IRC meetup. 🙁 Very sorry about this — I didn’t set an alarm and the time just breezed by.
I set an alarm! Will see everyone next Wednesday.
In other news, the poll results are starting to firm up. Winners? Integration with WordPress far and away, followed by anonymous posting, WYSIWYG, and email notifications. We’re not going to follow these exactly, but it definitely gives us an idea of what people are most interested in and now we have to look behind the answers at what people mean when they say they want something. For example maybe rather than WYSIWYG we could bring over Oembed support from WordPress? I usually think of WYSIWYG more as a layout thing but a lot of people see it as the only way to include rich media. I’ll dig more into these.
Alrighty, I’ve collated everything from the survey into the most popular requests, which you guys can now vote on, but only once. The votes aren’t necessarily determine what we work on first, but it’ll be good information to have.
What’s most important to you in bbPress 1.1?(polls)
If you have some ideas about what features should be in 1.1 take this survey and let me know. The survey is open until Saturday, and then on Monday will put up a poll for people to vote on what they like. I’ll share the results at the next IRC meetup on Wednesday. Update: Thanks to everyone who voted in the poll, it’s closed now.
