[christofius]

Before I respond, can I give you some comments about your draft.

1. Some of the proposed plugins should be integrated in the core. Report user, user roles, quotes, SEO, stickies, improved moderation, Pivate Messages: all of that I consider essential to a good forum script and while there is nothing wrong with making them into a plugin, it would be much more convenient for new users not to have to install a bunch of stuff to get those features.
2. I agree that bbpress has been neglected over the past years, and that the website especially needs a revamp.
3. I also think that the fork needs a better theming structure, one that is easier to use and allows people with little/no knowledge to be able to edit the theme.
4. I also think that this new software should include some features that have not been included in a lot of forum softwares, but are still useful, if not esential.

1. Moderation Log: the idea behind it is that whenever a post gets deleted, who deleted it, a copy of the deleted post, and some notes on why it got deleted are recorded in a log (that is only viewable to certain people, of course). That way administrators and moderators can easily keep track of troublemakers and they have a log of all past offenses.
2. Good page structure: most people spend a minuet or two looking at a site before deciding to join it. One of the factors that influence the decision is activity. The new forum software structure should be designed to reflect the activity of the forum, and how much fun people are having. This is mostly in the themes, so that’s why the default theme should be designed to reflect that.

But anyway, now I have 3 questions:

1. have you ever been on the development side of an open source project?
2. If this fork got underway, would you be running the show, and if you did, how much would you contribute to the project programing wise?
3. How would ideas get approved?

thank you for your time

[christofius]

that is integration. But why stop at user tables when you can do layout/content/user integration with several different softwares? I think that integration with other scripts, including wordpress, is crucial.

What will be happening is that people can extend the user or login classes so that external systems can be tied into the software (MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress etc).

Does that mean that you have it all figured out and the purpose of this thread is to get extremely talented programmers on board. I could be wrong, but it seems like you’re approving any and all ideas that come your way. If this fork is a democracy, I want in, but count me out if your going to have complete control over it.

I am aware that Matt technically has almost complete control over wordpress, but the difference is that he has a totally awesome script, whereas you have no script, and (as far as I know, correct me if I’m wrong) no experience contributing/managing php scripts.

[christofius]

I couldn’t agree more. The new bbpress needs something like wordpress’s custom post, and it would be awesome if bbpress had the same thing, only more flexible and with a UI.

Example: just drag a wigit in between topic title and message, and name it topic description.

WordPress already has the “app store”, but bbpress needs it to.

WordPress integration is crucial, because tons of people would like to have a cms and a forum. However, I don’t think that making bbpress a wordpress plugin is the right solution. Lot’s of people also want to have a standalone forum software. The integration just needs to be smoother.

If you guys could do that I would definitely use the forked software.

[christofius]

Yes, I have already posted pretty much the same message on the buddypress forums, and I have not gotten a response in a week accept for a guy who said that he had the same problem. I thought that I might have better luck here.