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Sending email to hotmail and aol accounts is impossible from any host that you can’t setup a proper rDNS and more importantly SPF.

SPF is critical (only gmail seems immune – thanks google, whew). If hotmail doesn’t see SPF or doesn’t like it, you’re screwed. Microsoft also caches the SPF results so if you change it, you have to write a support message to them and wait a week until someone sees it.

As far as host reliability, here’s my strange take on it over the years: you’ll never find a large host that you’ll be happy with. They all have issues. If someone thinks their large host is perfect they either just have been lucky or not with them long enough. Large hosts are constantly changing employees so customer service quality varies tremendously. And the more you need customer service on any host, the more you are in trouble.

For bbpress (and wordpress) make sure you find a host with locally attached storage to the server and not NFS like Dreamhost which makes file access very slow. There’s no caching module like wp-cache for bbpress so file access is even more critical.

The two first big questions I always ask are: what kind of hardware is my server running on and how many neighbors will I have. Backup quality is probably the next question. Everything else is either hype or irrelevant IMHO. You might also ask if the host is within their own datacenter and can literally reach out and touch their own hardware if they need to replace a hard drive or if they are at the mercy of yet another third party’s technical support to do it for them.

If you can afford it, get your own VPS with a low number of neighbors on the same node. But that’s definitely more expensive than shared hosting so you have to be willing to pay for it. At least with VPS you can migrate the entire setup within the same host fairly easily if your neighbors turn out to be abusive.

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As I was reverse integrating the WP trunk with the bbPress trunk this weekend I was thinking a lot more about this – and the more I think about it, the more I am getting confused about what is being planned.

If WP and bbPress are being coded to use to a unified function library that would definitely break wordpress hooks. But Matt would never do that as it would break 1000’s of plugins and themes for the far more popular WordPress.

In some ways, bbPress’s db/load process and hooks are slightly more thought out/evolved than WordPress because they came later and WordPress has to maintain some backward compatibility.

So then it occurred to me that to leave the WP hooks alone, I hope you are not trying to replace the core of bbPress only with WP-like functions? I don’t see how that could be done without breaking every single plugin and theme for bbPress? Will the next (non minor) release of bbPress have a nearly-unified WP core?

In trac I see BB functions being renamed to their WP counterparts. But no wrapper functions for backward compatibility are being written. I see the backend of bbPress being hammered into backPress and I imagine the next bbPress as simply a front-end being re-written to only use the backPress, ie. wordpress, hooks.

So I guess the final question is: is there a plan to write wrapper functions or is the general attitude just to abandon all third party work to date for the next bbPress release and just hope we go along for the ride?

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I’ve never participated in the WP one but if it’s straightforward enough and has no liability I’ll volunteer to do basic bbPress installs.

I’ve been thinking of looking at the fantastico script for wordpress and hacking it to do bbpress and sending to them to include. That would radically increase the number of installs. Maybe even try to make a regular cpanel script too like the phpbb install (cpaddon).

[_ck_]

If you are installing on a home pc, try installing XAMPP to get an instant (like 1 minute tops) install of apache+mysql+php

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61776

It’s absolutely wonderful.

this is the one for windows specifically if that’s what you have:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61776&package_id=89552

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Before I got to the bottom I almost knew right off it was dreamhost and a localhost issue.

Slugs aren’t working because they don’t do multiviews.

You’ll have to place a real htaccess file into the directory with rewrite rules.

https://bbpress.org/documentation/faq/#pretty-permalinks

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I have now updated “My-Views” to support pagination (multi-page) views for all the standard style views.

version 0.09 should be in the plugin browser shortly…

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/67

you can see a demonstration of the feature here:

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/latest-discussions

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Okay I think everything broke with 0.8.3 and the replacement bb_query class.

Prior to 0.8.3, all views did a bb_count_last_query() to determine the entire result count vs. the query with a LIMIT. This is how pagination was determined (via $view_count / $page)

But the new bb_query_class is short-sighted as it simply returns the number of results it found with the LIMIT attached, which is useless.

This essentially is a bug. Surprised no-one noticed it sooner. I don’t have 0.8.3 running on any large site so I never saw it before.

I’m trying to find a work-around for my own plugins (ie. “my-views”) but this will affect any plugin developer working with views.

[_ck_]

Views do actually have (the ability to do) paging.

If you put /page/2 after a view url you think should have a second page you’ll see it works.

I vaguely remember encountering the same problem but I can’t recall how I fixed it.

I believe the answer was something missing in the template but I am not positive and will see if I can find how I did it.

[_ck_]

This was my fault apparently.

Somehow the pluggable.php within bbpress was built 1074 when it absolutely needs 1075 to have the new wp_salt function.

So future note for integration to others:

to use the new WordPress 2.4/2.5 trunk

you MUST use bbpress build 1075

build 1074 and build 1076 will not integrate properly as is

[_ck_]

okay I found the cause but not the reason or solution.

this produces entirely different results in WP trunk vs BB trunk:

echo wp_hash("abc". "123")." - ". hash_hmac('md5', "abc" . "123", wp_hash("abc". "123"));

So each program cannot evaluate the other’s hash/key/hmac

Still researching. The salt is identical. This is perplexing.

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correction: the cookie value is made from the user name | expiration time | key (where key is calculated from the username+expiration)

Essentially the expiration and therefore the key are changing and I don’t know why. The functions are based on time() so the timezone within bbpress vs wordpress should not matter. And the pluggable functions are identical between the programs.

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Nice work.

Looks like there is “only” a 6k penalty on the browser side for the extra javascript and under 1k for the extra css. Bit of work on the server side but it may be worth it for a forum that deal with a lot of code being posted.

Be sure to submit it to the bbpress plugin browser

https://bbpress.org/plugins/add/

so it gets much more exposure.

[_ck_]

The trick would be doing it via ajax. Harder than it sounds.

Especially considering that bbpress’s ajax library is in flux from what I understand.

It’s easy to load the entire page including posts 15-74 and keep them hidden via css until clicked – this doesn’t even need a plugin – but the page load time and bloat, not to mention mysql load would be rather high.

[_ck_]

See my post in this thread for a similar way to handle this by allowing both freshness and exact time in a title attribute:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/how-do-you-change-the-freshness-of-post-date-format

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Some themes put it in the public footer but there’s no guaranteed way to find it other than the admin panel in the footer. And the build number is never available which is critical for trunk builds.

In part it’s a security risk if a flaw is found in old versions.

[_ck_]

Check with your host to see how often they do backups for you.

Some premium hosts do daily and weekly backups which would save you.

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Sam, I noticed that may have changed in/after 0.8.3.1

After some tinkering I also had to add:

$bb->sitecookiepath = '/';

(there is also a related minor issue in that I can’t seem to affect the cookie domain to be undotted in the newest builds)

[_ck_]

I have now put together some basic code which successfully interacts with OpenID servers.

Unlike other solutions it doesn’t requires any other libraries or special languages/features on the server other than CURL support (with SSL) which is fairly common.

Unfortunately during this time OpenID has upgraded to 2.0 and certain providers like Yahoo will only accept 2.0 queries and not 1.1 which is all the code can handle.

But if there is any serious interest, I could get bbPress to accept openid from wordpress.com/livejournal/aol/etc. which continue to allow 1.1

[_ck_]

bb-load essentially loads the entire bbpress framework

It just doesn’t generate any template output

It’s how RSS feeds, etc. are done

You can indeed evaluate the user login via loading the entire framework. But you can also write a very small subset of code to check the cookie and then read the database directly too.

However note that if your bbpress cookies are locked to a path (ie. /forums/) as they are by default, they will not be valid outside of the path and no user will be detected. So you have to change the cookiepath in config.php

Otherwise neither method will work.

[_ck_]

That has to be one of the top 10 themes I’ve seen for bbpress, very well done. The wordpress integration is also excellent.

I personally love white text on darker background so it’s a favorite for me.

Are you going to make it publicly available for download?

[_ck_]

Depending on which version of bbpress you are using, the method to put “closed” and “sticky” onto topic titles has changed. The newest versions (trunk, not sure if it’s in 0.8.3.1 yet) uses a new label method that in theory should be independent of the template.

However older bbpress versions require the “sticky” label be detected and placed via the template (theme). If you edited your templates, you may have inadvertently removed the feature.

Which bbpress version and theme are you using?

Make sure you are using the very newest support forum plugin update, I think it’s up to 2.3.4 which deals with the new bbpress update.

[_ck_]

Without going through the bbpress functions or mimicing the login authentication system (look in pluggable.php) you could never tell if a user is actually logged in, or being spoofed.

However the bbpress/wp cookie will persist and if the cookie path is set to the website root (instead of locked to “/forums/” – you’d have to change the default cookiepath) you could read the cookie and see if the visitor has a bbpress username. But if several people used the same computer there possibly could be several cookies.

In theory you could force sessions to always be on via a plugin for bbpress and watch it that way too. But note that sessions slow down server performance if it’s an active site.

Best bet is to change the cookiepath and decode the cookie with a smaller subset of code.

[_ck_]

Another fix for another caching bug:

The query below is never cached – hence if the avatar is for a user other than the current one and is shown multiple times on a page, it causes a query each time since it does not pass through the bbpress caching mechanism.

(around line 117)

$bb_query = "SELECT meta_value FROM $bbdb->usermeta WHERE meta_key='avatar_file' AND user_id='$id' LIMIT 1";

if ( $avatar = $bbdb->get_results($bb_query) ) {

replace with this code to properly cache and radically reduce queries on a busy topic:

if ( $avatar = bb_get_usermeta( $id, "avatar_file")) {

$a = explode("|", $avatar);

note that $avatar[0]->meta_value is then simply replaced with $avatar

This may require newer versions of bbpress (build 904+) but that was seven months ago as of my post now.

I think I am going to whip up a little “import gravatar” feature for this.

[_ck_]

Correct me if I am wrong but technically under the GPL if they modified an existing template and other plugins to make it work, they are required to make the code available

But we’ll just admire it from afar I guess…

[_ck_]

Gotta love kiwis, looks great!

I doubt bbpress will ever have native image support (you mean inline right?) That’s just too much “heavily lifting” which is always deferred to plugins.

ps. “Tiny”MCE is such a misnomer. It’s 125k of code!