Published on December 17th, 2009 by Matt Mullenweg
I missed the IRC meetup. đ 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.
We just had our first ever IRC meetup for the new bbPress, here are the logs, sorry if they’re a little rough. If you’d like to join in next time check out the Getting Involved page.
Read more →
Today we’ve released two versions of bbPress.
- bbPress 1.0.2 addresses a number of issues which have come up since the 1.0.1 release, including a problem where the voices count could get out of sync.
- bbPress 0.9.0.6 is the first “legacy” release of the bbPress 0.9 branch, which will be maintained for security until late 2010.
Both releases fix a long standing bug which was affecting the way spam was being reported via the Akismet plugin. These releases are recommended for all users of both bbPress branches.
Download either (or both!) from the download page now.
This bug fix release has been made available for download to address a number of issues that have been raised after the release of bbPress 1.0 including a security issue where multiple users could be registered with the same email address.
This is a recommended update for all users of bbPress 1.0. These issues do not affect users of bbPress 0.9.
That’s right, bbPress 1.0 finally hits the tubes!
After many months in alpha, beta and release candidate status, bbPress 1.0 final is now available for download.
Thanks to the many testers who contributed so much important feedback during the pre-release period, going way back to 1.0 alpha 1.
This release offers many usability improvements, based on making bbPress more approachable for adopters who are accustomed to WordPress. To that end bbPress 1.0 now has a similar administration interface to WordPress and uses similar descriptions and names where appropriate. bbPress also behaves more like WordPress when it comes to things like automatically generating your .htaccess file when setting up permalinks.
Here are a few of the improvements over the 0.9 series:
- “Voices” count on topics reports the number of individuals participating in a conversation
- Native support for cookie integration (single sign-on) with WordPress 2.7 and 2.8
- Optional support for memcached object caching
- Time-zone and Daylight Savings time support
- A complete XML-RPC publishing API
- Pingback support – each topic can receive pingbacks, just like a blog post
- All javascript has been moved to jQuery
- Optionally allow login via email address as well as username
- New meta API allows arbitrary meta data to be stored for posts, topics, forums, options, tags or even meta (that’s right, meta-meta – first legitimate use wins a prize)!
- Display names used primarily for user identification display, which allows special characters to be used
- Themes can now have a “functions.php” file, which is automatically loaded
- Accessibility improvements on forms and in the default theme, including WAI-ARIA roles
- Major overhaul of the admin interface
- Optional Akismet statistics page
- Cute new icons from Ben Dunkle (pictured above)
- Improved use of posts admin to manage spam
- Prettier Kakumei (default) theme
- Hello Louie! Plugin
If you are upgrading from any earlier release to 1.0 then you absolutely should backup all you files and database before doing so. You also may need to make minor adjustments to your templates. Before upgrading, disable all plugins.
Dedication
bbPress 1.0 is named “Bechet” (pronounced beh-shay) after the pioneering jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet.
After the release of 1.0-RC-2 there was a lot of great feedback both in the support forums and on Trac. Some new issues came up around WordPress integration, caching and SQL query performance which were simply too important to leave out of the final 1.0 release.
After taking careful aim at these issues I’ve decided to make one last release candidate available. There is still a little cosmetic work to do in the admin area, but you will find a few new improvements there too, like better handling of .htaccess auto-generation and full timezone support, including automatic daylight savings switching.
1.0-RC-3 is available now from the download page.
Today we are releasing what will be the final release candidate for bbPress 1.0 before it goes to 1.0 final in a couple of days.
The release is available now from the downloads page.
This release incorporates many bug fixes to BackPress via the final work in the lead up to the release of WordPress 2.8
It also has a surprise in the form of the groundwork for a new admin interface which borrows its look and feel from WordPress. The admin area is currently lacking a lot of design nuance in the content areas, but all the forms and controls are at least functional. Let’s call this the “excuse the mess” release candidate.
Despite the current changes in the admin area this code is now stable enough to use in a production environment, and in fact internally at Automattic we have been doing so for quite some time. Specifically on TalkPress and the BuddyPress.org forums. It’s important that we get as much testing and feedback occurring as possible, so that the final release is as robust as we can make it.
bbPress changes since release candidate 1 are here.
BackPress changes since release candidate 1 are here.
Please file any new issues on Trac.
Yesterday we pushed the first release candidate for bbPress 1.0 out the door. You can grab it from the download page.
Over the next few weeks there will be a (relatively) rapid progression of “RC” releases as we move towards a final release of 1.0
bbPress is almost stable enough to use on a live website, but I can’t recommend that yet. If you want to try it out on your existing data, then I suggest you make a complete copy of your site and then upgrade. If you just want to take a look and see what’s changed then try a fresh install (some independent testing of the installer is always useful).
If you find a problem please report it in Trac so I can get onto it as soon as possible.
