[_ck_]

There actually is a section on TRAC for “bbpress.org website” to report bugs, so I am going to suggest we start posting there and fill trac with trackable bug reports that can be fulfilled and commented on individually?

https://trac.bbpress.org/newticket

go to “component” and select “bbpress.org website”

feel free to still post them here but on TRAC is even better too

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If someone wants to start a “positive only” bbPress as WP plugin topic, I promise not to post in there.

People have the right to be blindly optimistic, regardless if there were not one but two different versions of bbPress that were never finished. I mean it should be different by the third time around right?

Seriously: I’d suggest starting with outlining how the Automattic version of the plugin is going to be different/better than the two other existing WP forum plugins, what audience it’s going to address, what it definitely will and definitely won’t do.

I’ve been around since WP 1.5 and when bbPress 0.80 was released, so it’s extremely easy for me to be jaded.

This is an opportunity to get in on the ground floor by watching changes carefully here and reading every line of code submitted since it’s starting from scratch:

https://trac.bbpress.org/browser/branches/plugin

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By the way I want to address this quote:

…it’s not “Automattic” that decides what ends up in the core of WordPress – we have open discussions to set the feature lists for each release and the decisions are driven based on input from a large base of regular contributors.

You are kidding yourself if you think the community is given anything but choices on minor things. Major decisions that change the entire direction of these projects for Automattic are made every year by Matt. Changing bbPress to use backPress is the #-1 example of a single sourced decision done without any input from any contributors. bbPress as a WordPress plugin is another one.

The very first simple question I asked when I heard about backPress is “when will WordPress be changed to also use backPress” (to benefit from all the work needed and the theoretical savings from using a common function set). It’s a very easy problem to predict but was never asked and never answered, ending us up exactly where we are today.

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Ah the problem is fixed now, found the site via google.

The page you are linking to for suggestions is for vbulletin which is an entirely different forum program.

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Somewhere on your page or in your stylesheets the word NOWRAP appears.

So do a view source and search for NOWRAP.

Then look in style.css for NOWRAP

Somewhere, one of them is causing the trouble.

Another nasty workaround might be

.num, #forumlist small {

overflow:hidden;

max-width:400px;

but I highly recommend finding the real source of the problem.

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You could try the lazy way and force a CSS override.

white-space: wrap !important;

Basically in one of the earlier or later rules you have nowrap set.

make certain you have a closing } though on this block

.num, #forumlist small {

font: 11px Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;

text-align: center;

}     <<<<<

missing ?

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What’s ironic is that while the question itself is not spam, what is the purpose of 100 blogs/forums, so automated they have to be controlled from one location?

ie. Sounds like possible search engine spam to me.

But if there’s an honest use, please correct me.

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With all the eyeballs looking at WordPress and all the new faces every few years, it’s amazing to me how much code optimization falls through the cracks and is never addressed.

bbPress as a plugin is now going to be exposed to that. In fact, ironically in 0.9 there are functions from earlier versions of WordPress that were never optimized and do “expensive” recalculations and yet it’s STILL significantly faster than 1.0 with the newer functions from BackPress.

WordPress still has places where it calculates kinds of conversion tables yet never stores them statically for when it will likely be used again in the same page load. All those eyeballs looking at the code never see it and never fix it.

WordPress after all these years STILL uses the poorly performing SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS, something that was discovered and fixed in bbPress 0.9 but ironically was re-introduced with BackPress in 1.0, and will likely continue as a plugin.

My problem with “progress” is regression. It happens often because no-one questions the bloat and then the bloat starts to hide mistakes because the code is too hard to follow and people forget the original purpose of a function.

But by all means, keep throwing junk into the core, don’t dare keep it isolated in a plugin where it can be examined and improved easily (ie. avatars, tinymce, phpmailer, etc.)

They never do version freezes for long periods of time to clean up and optimize code, they just pile on features in the name of progress.

Go install WP 2.1 and check the memory and query footprint.

Then install WP 3.0 and compare. It’s fairly disgusting in comparison.

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@Marius, but everyone downloads different ones.

I’d never want to see even a handful of my plugins built into bbPress by default.

As much as people express the desire for a program to do everything they want out-of-the-box, it’s a VERY bad idea with software. Makes things too bulky. WordPress today is a perfect example of what happens when you give into that desire, you get bloated, overloaded, slow code.

But sadly they don’t believe in plugins – I’m kinda surprised even akismet is not hard coded into WordPress.

bbPress should have been a lightweight framework, half the size that it is now, that maybe shipped with a dozen plugins that are OFF by default. Too late now though.

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@gswaim, except history is about to be repeated with nothing learned. “Very near” is also not likely this year. Completely different people worked on 0.9/1.0 and now the plugin version. There is going to be a learning curve.

The plugin version is going to have the same tumultuous development pattern that bbPress 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0 did and probably take a couple years to get stable and feature rich. It will probably also suffer from what I call the “kitchen sink” syndrome of WordPress where massive chunks of code are added as features which should have been plugins. But Automattic in general has a “not invented here” attitude towards plugins – if it’s not in the core, it doesn’t count.

There is also the problem that anyone on a shared host will unlikely be able to run WP 3.0 with the bbPress plugin unless they have a very small forum/memberbase. The resource demand is going to be massive and require hours of fine tuning which most novices will not be able to do. Forums cannot be heavily cached like blogs can.

Then you are right back to the same old WP problems which will be introduced into bbpress after avoiding them previously, plopping regular users into confusing WP admin menus to change settings and completely different than the site theme.

For the casual WP user that has a few dozen members and wants a simple forum, the bbpress as plugin will be very handy. For those with thousands of members and end up with a very active forum, they will spend a great deal of time dealing with the resource loads.

Remember, there are already a couple of plugins for WordPress that bring forum functionality – go look at their problems to foresee what is going to happen. That’s how I ended up adopting bbPress standalone in the first place, I decided it was the best way to deal with the problems (work AROUND wordpress, instead of through it).

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bbPress 0.9 downloads: 149095

bbPress 1.0 downloads: 106462

_ck_ plugin downloads: 93179

(but I think the plugin download counter was broken after bbpress.org 2.0)

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JJJ: Nothing is being dropped, or abandoned, or tossed aside anytime soon.

Good to hear. Probably should have started this topic with that as the first sentence as it would have prevented a lot of misunderstanding by many folks.

Based on my experience and knowledge of bbPress internals, even with two developers working on it, there is no way a bbPress plugin is going to be robust enough in 2010 for the public, unless compatibility is going to be completely thrown out the window and it’s “bbPress” in name only (hence again my point, do not call it bbPress).

But I’d like to hear the following as FACT from Matt instead of just casual opinion (as good of an opinion as it is):

JJJ: … if a bug fix or security issues pops up with 1.0/1.1 branches, the responsible thing to do is to fix it and push out updates.

For the record I’ll state that I intend to keep 0.9 going as long as reasonably possible. Before that last sentence appears elsewhere on the net let me qualify it by saying that doesn’t mean I am going to run a public fork of it. But in theory people should be able to count on it for years. Features would be added as plugins, not in the core.

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Does Matt realize that over 10,000 sites are currently using the standalone version of bbPress?

That’s not a massive number but it’s not trivial either.

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Something else just occurred to me.

Is Matt planning to just “nuke” all the existing content on bbPress.org ?

Do we need to start archiving ?

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Please do not call the plugin version bbPress.

This entire support forum and plugin section for bbPress will have ZERO meaning for the plugin and will only serve to confuse people.

All the years of advice here for the two major versions of the standalone version will be useless for the plugin version.

Please call it something else.

Matt once said he didn’t like the bbPress name anyway, here’s his chance to change it.

Please change it before there are 1000 newbie questions from the WordPress forums clogging up this entire site and making all the old valuable advice disappear.

Need I mention the search for wp/bbpress is horrible so it will be impossible to sort out questions about the plugin vs standalone version.

The extend plugin section has absolutely no data or way to sort by which bbPress version they are for. This will only become much worse when there is yet another major derivative of bbPress.

The standalone version will be in use and independently developed for many years, perhaps even the remainder of this decade, so please use the opportunity start things off right for your plugin project.

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Must be an old version I have on the SVN

Edit the view.php template for the plugin and add this before the

</form>

<input type="hidden" name="view" value="leaderboard">

ugh, bbpress.org is messing up the code, make the view template look like this, the one added line in the middle:

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=XbSxR6VQ

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I know of at least one very complex, very high volume bbpress site that uses cloning very well. And stand-alone makes the site much more responsive. It even uses several installed copies of bbpress linked very well.

It’s the cost of the environment you chose. If you absolutely insist on using WordPress, you better be ready to throw a ton of hardware at it if you need to scale and insist on deep integration.

It’s perfectly possible to create cached portions of a site or common segments that can be included across WP and bbPress. It’s a matter of intelligent design.

When you start banking on 1mb of code loading per instance and a few dozen queries per user per page because of deep integration, you are guaranteed growth failure sooner or later – it just won’t scale.

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This is a long time bug with bbpress that I’ve pointed out a few times but it’s too late now I guess to change it’s behavior.

The problem is that repermalink is not called before the bb_init hook so little is known about the page you are on.

If you try to call repermalink manually, it may mess up things later because it doesn’t like to be called twice. However in some cases you can get away with it.

Note it’s almost ALWAYS more efficient to bypass the bbpress API unless the data you need is already loaded in memory/cache.

You can calculate the last page with a single get_var query, so it’s more efficient to do that yourself if you need it right away and can’t wait for when the templates start loading (or are bypassing the templates loading).

Since bbpress does not re-calculate post-position when a post is deleted, if there are deleted posts in a topic, the page calculation from the API will almost certainly be wrong (the more deleted, the more likely wrong if the user is not admin). Hence using your own query will again be better.

Somewhere I have a really fancy mysql query to calculate the real page a post is on, let me know if you want me to dig for it.

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He wants the user wall plugin which I cannot release at this time.

And he’s starting to nag because he also asked last month:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/user-wall-plugin-from-bbshowcase

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I’ve been talking about this for years.

The “performance” tag has a few gems in there I’ve written over time.

bb-benchmark will also show you all the queries via the same method and a few other details, unfortunately the newest version is not in the plugin section right now because of how bbpress.org is broken.

Part of the problem on the WP side is many times the plugins do not set their options to autoload (and have a whole bunch of options). I believe bbPress 1.x now has the same problem (it was avoided in 0.9 but re-introduced with backpress).

I have a mini-plugin somewhere for 1.x to load all options with one query.

Some setups can take hours to get the queries down, it’s exhausting

Next you should notice that WP 3.0 + bbPress 1.x takes nearly 1 megabytes of code per instance and in some cases won’t even run on shared hosts because it goes over the PHP ini default setting of 32MB during runtime.

If you are using a tag cloud, my “hot tags plus” will cache the complex query for the tag cloud and all rendering becomes static.

ps. the real answer is not to do deep integration – just make a clone theme for bbpress, it’s worth the effort – the good thing about that is if WP is down, bbpress can still run

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Someone copied my plugin (they used ALL of my lines then added a few) but they defeated the entire purpose.

Their code only runs if there is an active user, if someone is not logged in and there is a loophole, the code would run unchallenged.

Plus they exclude admin, so if there is a hacked account, the code is also bypassed.

Here is my improved version of my original code

if (strlen($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])>255 ||

preg_match('@(eval|base64|unescape)[^a-zA-Z0-9]@si',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']))

{

header('HTTP/1.1 414 Request-URI Too Long');

header('Status: 414 Request-URI Too Long');

header('Connection: Close');

exit;

}

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Reminder to whomever is doing the subtle fixes I am seeing, the backtick/code tag is still broken here.

example:

testing code, fixed? <?php if (2>1) {echo "testing";} ?>

you should not see &gt/&lt/&quot or multiple ;;; in the above example.

In fact even outside of backticks there is still a htmlentity encoding problem

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The directory is above site root by default but you can put it anywhere if you don’t care about security. The way WP does it is completely insecure on shared servers. Any chmod 777 folder under the webroot is a beautiful target for evil hackers.

A small percentage of people still seem to have problems with the install routine that is supposed to run upon activation and create the table. I had to use a workaround because of a bug with 0.8 and IIs users but that may break it for other people, especially with 1.0

you can try replacing the bb_register_activation_hook line with the conventional line that might finally be working correctly under 1.x

bb_register_plugin_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'bb_attachments_install');

Keep in mind I have not updated bb-attachment in over a year due to a lack of donations, so feel free to write your own. Keep in mind whatever you write will not be compatible/necessary with the eventual version of bbpress that runs as a WP plugin.

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Page links for 0.9

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/page-links-for-bbpress/

For the life of me I can’t remember how I do the labels, I think it’s just a tweak… let me see…

Yeah it’s just a little nasty mini-plugin I wrote, also meant for 0.9, probably would not work as expected in 1.0

http://pastebin.com/embed_iframe.php?i=sp8NRrZ5

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It’s good that bbpress is still somewhere in the list but don’t kid yourself, you won’t see bbPress as a stable WP plugin this year. It would take a great deal of work to make it happen, Matt would have to assign a dedicated coder which he is not likely to do.

Even if all backward compatibility was completely ignored (which will likely happen) it still could not likely be released this year.

Sam indirectly helped quite a bit by all his work in making 1.x use backpress but there will still have to be major refactoring. JJJ’s plugin attempt still uses backpress. But they can’t do that as an official WordPress plugin, the overhead would be staggering and would instantly get a bad reputation.

I am begging anyone that will listen to NOT call it bbPress because there will be major confusion. There will be nearly ZERO compatibility with all previous bbPress themes, plugins and advice. The entire bbpress.org forum will become a mess of tangled support questions for standalone vs plugin version questions.

Then there will be bbPress plugins that are actually installed into WordPress to supplement bbPress. That will certainly confuse newbies.

Just call it the wp-forums plugin or something like that and make a sub-forum for support on WP.org – leave bbpress.org for the standalone version.