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I’m looking at how openid is done and I think I’ll make the login even more simple for users – I’ll let them choose from like the top five or ten providers in a dropdown, ie.

1. aol

2. livejournal

3. wordpress

4. ??

5. ??

and then tell then to enter their username on that service – that way they don’t need to figure out it’s username.website.com

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I wonder if I force all my bbpress logins through wordpress if I can just use that openid plugin there and it will work on bbpress…

only one way to find out I guess…

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I solved all spam on my blogs quite easily – any post with more than one url never gets approved, never displayed. I’ve yet to see spammers not be greedy and only post one url.

I had forgotten about the OpenID standard! We need to try to suggest that to the right people making WP/BB. That would be one of the most useful features ever (wordpress.com has nearly a quarter million registered members!)

update: WAIT! It’s been done?!?!?

http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/03/06/openid/

How do we get openid support into bbpress then?!

added: here’s a wordpress plugin to allow openid, now we need to port it to bbpress…

http://verselogic.net/projects/wordpress/wordpress-openid-plugin/

I’ll start a new topic on this…

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Oh I didn’t realize xcache is just an opcode cache. I already use eaccelerator which seems to have zero quirks compared to other solutions. But yeah, any opcode cache for wordpress/bbpress is a must for any active site.

I already create the sidebar statically across my sites, saves a lot of work and repetition on the db.

the wp-cache “plugin” has flaws in it’s logic. I noticed that unregistered visitors were getting edit links on posts, not good, even if they couldn’t actually edit. Then it has an exclude feature to keep certain parts dynamic, but you can’t have wordpress calls in those dynamic parts because wordpress isn’t actually loaded, which is the whole point. so it won’t work and gives error (#1 confusion to most people trying to use it)

In the end, I hacked wp-cache to only cache the RSS feeds which were causing the most requests, yet the most static of all the content. Caching rss feeds on bbpress should be an easy, useful thing too, but then on a forum I highly doubt the use of rss feeds on anything but the latest discussions.

What really worries me about the 0.84 release is the xml-rpc pingbacks. bbpress is going to become known as the spammers forum of choice with a bad rep, until novices are given an easy option to turn it off, or better yet it’s off by default. I cannot disagree more highly with the entire feature idea. It defeats the entire purpose of a forum. What they are trying to do is have a universal way to cross post across forums but the whole point of a forum is *community* and getting people to actually visit, not stay away.

What they really should do instead of pingbacks if they want easy cross communication, is have a universal login based on a database at wordpress.com – Basically anyone with a wordpress account could visit your wordpress or bbpress site and instantly post if they wanted as “wp.membername” without having to register again and again. Sure there are security issues to be tackled but it’s better than anonymous spam heaven on pingbacks. Akismet won’t protect pingbacks, I see spam in my wordpress.com account every week.

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How do you handle caching a page with items only a moderator should see, and then pages that are okay for subscribers, and then pages that are for open public? The cache will have to be rather smart. And then you can’t show any personal information on the page like the user’s name if it’s going to be cached.

bbpress still has some non-optimised routines that don’t use the soft cache, for example on the topic page, I’ve noticed it does a query at the end to fetch all the forums names for the moderator “move this topic” tool. Those should definitely be in the cache but it’s not used.

For a logged out user, I have my topic pages down to 15 queries. That’s the most “expensive page”. It uses 3 more queries for a logged in user (one of them listed above).

But I’ve got this geoip flag function that I wrote to show country flags and unfortunately it’s very “expensive” and adds an extra query for every unique poster on the topic page. There’s no way to stack requests since it must search by range (researched it like crazy but no solutions). I have to eventually code it to store the country data in the usermeta. But there’s the issue that their IP/location can change on a per-post basis and that sometimes I have to patch the geo information because the db gets it wrong. Oh well.

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Are you aware that flicker image you load in your header is over 500k in size? That’s a little crazy – even on broadband I can count the seconds while it loads…

So just out of curiosity how many queries does bb+wp combined use per page load…?

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bbpress uses so few queries that caching has got to be a low priority, especially when the point of a forum is to have very dynamic updates customised for the logged in member – it’s very different than a wordpress environment

as long as you have the mysql cache turned on, it should be very responsive – just look at the main wordpress support forum – eaccelerator would take care of caching the php opcode and that can’t be too far behind a static page

the bonus is that on an active forum, everything will be very dynamic as it happens…

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Oh weird. I wonder why I didn’t see that and thought it was after. Oh wait, I know what the problem was, I didn’t like how it was after the submit button and couldn’t think of a proper method to manipulate it with CSS.

Oh well. After I get the polls plugin going I’ll go back to signatures. Signatures I’ll never use myself but I want polls…

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Okay anyone wanna see a prototype?

You can’t vote yet, but you can create a fake poll and see what it looks like so you can give me feedback and ideas.

I gave up on migrating an existing poll program after realising all the issues with custom bbpress integration, even from a wp port.

I’ve locked the demo to moderators (and higher) for now so even when you create a poll, no one else should be able to see it, or the options.

http://ckon.wordpress.com/files/2007/08/bb-polls.txt?v001

rename .txt to .php, install, activate

create a new topic of any sort and then look below the meta at the top for the option to create the poll

try creating one with a few options, it should be saved and then you’ll see some randomised results for a little colourful demo.

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Sorry, I got distracted with the signatures plugin.

If this migraine ever subsides I will take a look at integrating polls this weekend…

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Good point HowToGeek. The array keys could also be manipulated without having to put back in the topic descriptions too. I could extend the plugin to let the user determine views order.

Sigh, unfortunately all this will be useless in a month or so. I still don’t have the vaguest clue how to convert my routines to the trunk’s new methods.

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It’s a good question and something I vaguely remember reading before around here.

In theory (don’t try it until you hear from others) you could rename the bbpress user + usermeta tables for wp, and then tell bbpress to look at the wp tables like a typical integration.

You’ll also need to install several plugins and tweaks to make sure that wp registrations are properly handled on the bbpress side.

(whatever you do, backup first!)

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It’s a very nice integration.

There’s a problem with the text contrast though, the text colour is too light on the white background and that makes it hard to read for some people.

IMHO there’s also too much text on each page with nothing breaking it up like smaller images.

Am I imagining things or is this like the third weightloss site using bbpress posted here? Are these just “made for adsense” sites?

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@fel64, yeah I saw post-form but it closes the form before the action is called so any fields inserted would not be passed with the data. I’d have to do some weird javascript kung-fu to insert a field into the previous form and that’s just too messy for my taste.

The real solution is some kind of hook in the template loader so before and after it does the “include”, then it lets you insert anything you want on any template. Now that would make for super flexibility.

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Never insert your own columns into the bbpress core data.Use the meta or create a new table.

Just a warning the the bbpress api is still in a state of flux so some plugins will be obsolete or non-functional soon. For example my “My Views” plugin will be useless once the next trunk becomes stable as they’ve change the entire “views” structure and basically anything else dealing with a query. It’s somewhat confusing (and messy) to me and I’ll have to wait to see examples in new plugins.

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Here we go!

http://ckon.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/new-plugin-bbpress-signatures/

updated to v0.11 – now with admin menu!

http://ckon.wordpress.com/files/2007/07/bb-signatures.txt

(rename .txt to .php)

If you have plugins for smilies and/or allow images in post text, it will obey them, this is probably a good thing and desired.

You can set the minimum user level needed to show signatures and also the ability not to repeat a user’s signature more than once per page.

Instructions: install, activate, tinker with settings in admin menu

If you would like the optional toggle on new/edit posts to disable signatures you must edit the edit-form.php & post-form.php templates and place at or near the bottom:

<? bb_signatures_checkbox(); ?>

(you can wrap it in a DIV and float it to the left, right style anyway you’d like

sorry but there’s no way to do this directly through a plugin)

Here’s a fancier version that I use:

<div style=”float:left” ><? if (function_exists(‘bb_signatures_checkbox’)) {bb_signatures_checkbox();} ?></div>

Version History:

0.05 :slashes & autop fixed, replaced input with textarea, max_lines now supported in post-processing, max_length checked in realtime (as well as post processing)

0.06 :internal testing/bugfix

0.07 :per-post signature toggle

0.08 :toggle for allow html and allow images should now work

0.10 :basic functioning admin menu

0.11 :more intelligent admin menu

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Oh this is driving me crazy.

Every so often, the private forum settings reset back to open to all and expose the moderator forum to everyone. Not good.

Until this bug is found I need to know how to hardwire a forum by number via code to always be moderator’s only.

update: I hardwired private_forums_custom_get_options, adding

if (!bb_current_user_can("moderate")) {$private_forums_for_user[8] = "MODERATOR";}

This should make sure no matter what, #8 stays private

Hopefully you can find the bug soon… it might even be a bbpress core bug which is scary… then again, your settings are the only ones that seem to reset?

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I’ll have even more features tonight.

Working on a basic admin menu now.

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Well why wait for tomorrow when you can put off other work and do it today

I now have per-post signature disable ability on v0.07 though sadly you must edit two templates to get that ability, there is no way to hook the form from the plugin, at least none that I can find in the API.

What’s really ironic is that I will most likely never use this plugin on my own forums, ha!

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I’m now getting a median response time of about 0.125 seconds for 8 queries on the top page and 0.205 seconds for 12 queries on a topic page.

That’s like night and day compared to what you had before. It was taking almost a full second in some cases, look at the bottom source of the static.html !!!

Now can you believe most shared hosting environments have mysql cache turned off by default!!! Even your VPS neighbours may have it turned off which is causing high disk load that’s affecting you. This is where all those who claim how VPS is superiour are wrong. Disk access is the achilles heel of VPS (and shared hosting).

Next performance improvement you can do is install eaccelerator. Though it’s nowhere near as easy as editing mysql and restarting services.

Do you know how much guaranteed ram you have on your vps? Because the mysql and eacellerator cache will eat into that. If you have less that 128mb it will limit the sheer number of simultaneous connections you can have. Though for your needs I don’t think it’s a big deal unless all the search engines start scanning you at once.

ps. don’t worry any more about mysql tuning and phpmyadmin status reports, it’s really all you can do for now – the rest is a limit of how wordpress/bbpress works and can’t be avoided

pps. most of your pages are now coming up in 1.5 seconds for me when they were taking up to 6 seconds before – there are still some weird delays sometimes though which must be OS loads

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I should have a per-post disable signature option working by tomorrow. Putting it in there to learn some more, wow it’s tricky. This programming stuff is addictive.

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Since all resized images are changed to jpegs (I think?) the answer would be no, unless you upload an exact size so it doesn’t get resized.

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Interesting, you are right that it still works when removed, just refreshes the page instead of ajaxed.

I get a white screen redirect when I delete or undelete a topic but that’s probably my over-hacked template and something critical I removed… hmm…

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Don’t re-invent the wheel. WP-Chunk

or Sam Ingle’s Link Truncator for WordPress can be hacked to support bbpress in under 5 minutes. There are probably others too.

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It adds the (half-dozen) ajax scripts to topic pages.

Doesn’t affect other pages from what I can see.

In theory it’s very necessary, can’t delete topics without it since there is no non-ajax fallback from what I can see. Also things like adding/removing favorites within a topic.

You can reduce mysql queries by pre-loading all options in one fetch at startup. Try this un-documented option in config.php

$bb->load_options = true;

personally I can’t wait ’til they stop using prototype.js since it’s HUGE for the few functions they access

then there is add-load-event which is 200 or so bytes but not combined with any other script so it forces yet another external file load