Forum Replies Created
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In reply to: Lets Talk about Facebook Connect
@grassrootspa – It sounds like there are two different issues being discussed:
1) bbPress needs a Facebook connect feature
2) That feature (along with a bunch of others) should be in the core
1) FB Connect
On the first point… typically the way new features get built is to either:
* build it yourself, or to
* hire someone to build it for you.
The third path is to try and convince others to build it for you for free… but I’ve very rarely ever seen that work.
I’ve actually read stats that show that Facebook Connect can greatly uptick registration:
http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/facebook-connect-still-tiny-will-grow-fast
So it may be worth building. But it’s very very difficult to convince someone to develop plugins for free, especially when we don’t have many (any?) active plugin developers… so that basically just leaves the options to build it yourself or to hire someone to build it for ya.
If you tell the developer that it will be open source, maybe they will discount their fee? Or you could ask other users to contribute to the fee…
2) All/most major features should be in the Core
WordPress has put a ton of features into the Core. It’s gotten to the point where even smallish sites can’t run without a caching plugin:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001105.html
It’s not just CPU – the latest versions also eat up lots of memory just to serve up a single page:
http://www.oceanlight.com/log/wordpress-28-memory-usage-and-bloat.html
I’m not sure if this Canonical Plugins initiative would help reduce this bloat or not:
https://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/canonical-plugins/
We don’t have to predict that moving most features into the core will increase bloat and slow down servers… it’s already happened on the WordPress side of things. I think most smaller blogs don’t mind – you can just add caching and be fine for a while. It’s a lot harder for larger sites… I’ve wrestled with scaling my blog, and I’m on a dedicated server. But Matt mentioned that scaling is not really an issue, so I must be missing something:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/08/28/podcast-25-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/
I think it will be a lot harder to cache bbPress than it will be to cache WordPress, since community sites update so many more times than to a blog. So the WordPress strategy to put a lot of features into the core and address scaling through a caching option… probably won’t be as effective on the bbPress side of things. So that makes it even more important to keep the bbPress core clean.
In any case, I don’t want to be a downer here – there’s still hope for the bbPress platform, if we can unite around keeping the core engine “simple, fast, and elegant” (especially fast!!). If not, then it will be tough to keep the platform viable and we risk losing what progress we’ve made so far.
In reply to: 1.1 feature pollElias – I thought your previous post was excellent, and I agreed with almost 100% of it – including your suggestion around the core plugins structure.
Just wanted to clarify as an unbiased third party (I have zero affiliation with WordPress/Automattic and am not a mod on this board) that your post being flagged as spam was almost certainly just Akismet acting up again.
Posts with links are often flagged by Akismet – it’s happened many times on this forum:
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/akismet-4-link-limit-in-posts-or-whitelist
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/where-is-the-option-to-allow-more-links-in-a-post
On a separate note… I don’t think it’s helpful to refer to the future direction of bbPress as a “WordCrapPressy Bloaty Piece Of Unuseable And Totally Overloaded Shit”. I’m super worried about bloat and feature overload too – it’s just that inflammatory language tends to shift the conversation into yelling at each other, rather than focusing on addressing the issues raised.
In reply to: 1.1 feature poll@timskii – Completely agree with you on the idea of standard plugins. WordPress is starting to move in a similar direction:
https://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/canonical-plugins/
Also agree that forums are more dynamic and less suitable for caching than blogs, making bloat an especially important factor. This wasn’t as much of an issue through the 0.7-0.9 branches, but has starting to become more of an issue in 1.0 – especially with the BackPress integration.
In reply to: bbpress 1.0 or 0.9?Hey citizenkeith… do you have bbPress benchmark installed?
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-benchmark/
I’d be interested in the number of queries/output time for your installs… I’ve seen a 10x speed difference in test installs and am wondering how common that is!
In reply to: 1.1 feature poll@grassrootsspa – The size of the code isn’t necessarily the key factor in bloat. A tiny but poorly coded feature or plugin can put an immense load on the server! I think for most personal sites this isn’t a big factor, but scaling is a huge factor for some sites and I greatly appreciate having the choice to keep features out of my core engine.
In any case, history is on your side… Matt tends to move features from the plugin into the core (or just add them straight to the core). Sam was moving in that direction too – Voices went straight into the core without any discussion or debate, even though it could easily have been implemented as a plugin:
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/topic-voices/
Overall what bbPress needs right now is not new features or a new release. It needs documentation of what we have, and a focus on building a developer/designer community. A themes directory would go a long way towards that. So would sprucing up the Extend/plugins tab not to be using the 0.8.x version of bbPress… which isn’t even signin integrated! And Stats have been “coming soon” for several years now:
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-cumulus/stats/
Implementing this stuff (along with a site redesign) would also give the Automattic leadership time to get to know the bbPress community better, before any hasty design decisions are made.
In reply to: bbpress 1.0 or 0.9?Yes, 1.0 has a dramatically higher load.
I’m running 9 0.9.x bbPress installs along with a WordPress install on a single machine that’s doing around 10mm pageviews a month. If I was using the 1.0 branch, I don’t think I could come close to that.
In reply to: Password Protected ForumI wouldn’t use forum restriction… it was abandoned by the original author and _ck_ took it over, but then she later created the excellent “Hidden Forums” plugin from scratch:
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/hidden-forums/
I was actually using “Private Forums” by another author for a while, but it had a major bug where it would randomly open up private folders when you used the admin menu for other plugins… it was a nightmare:
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/private-forums/
Hidden Forums has been fantastic – I’ve used it on multiple installs and there’s never been a privacy breach. Highly recommended.
In reply to: Marking Topics as "resolved"Try this plugin?
In reply to: RSS ProblemSimilar issues have been reported by plugins having extra spaces at the end of ’em:
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/fix-to-rss-xml-parsing-error
Try deactivating your plugins and see if the issue resolves itself… if so, then activate one plugin at a time until the XML error pops up again!
In reply to: RSS ProblemIt looks like there’s an extra space at the beginning of your feed?
In reply to: What's happening with bbPress?Sadness – Since you quoted me, I wanted to make sure to correct the record in a few places:
Matt must care about bbPress – he wrote the initial version himself!
Sam was not working for free when he programmed v 1 – he was a paid employee of Automattic from Nov 07 to August 09:
http://unlettered.org/2007/11/13/wax-on/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sambauers
Just wanted to make sure that any inaccuracies weren’t left uncorrected…
In reply to: BBPress Polls for 1.02 or other polls working?Please reinstall it and post a detailed bug report – we may be able to figure out the issue for you. It also may be a conflict with another plugin, which you could resolve by deactivating that other plugin (or finding an alternative).
In reply to: To Matt: What's the status here??There won’t be any changes to bbPress for quite some time… if Matt does replace Sam, it will take time for any new release to come out.
So actually, this is probably the most stable time in the history of bbPress’ codebase to be making themes or plugins!
In reply to: BBPress Polls for 1.02 or other polls working?What sort of bugs are you seeing when you install it on 1.02?
In reply to: Problems with bbpressThat error sounds similar to this one:
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/who-can-shed-some-light-here
Are you using any of the plugins mentioned in that post? Might be worth disabling them temporarily, and seeing if that impacts the error…
In reply to: stast.php?You can see that here:
In reply to: if logged inYou can work around the bug by installing the topics-per-page plugin, and then editing your template:
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/navigation-not-working-only-for-page-1#post-56239
You can find the plugin here:
In reply to: What's happening with bbPress?Ah wow, only six donations huh.
_ck_ already said three months ago that if things didn’t change by December, she wouldn’t be doing plugins upgrades for 1.0:
http://bbshowcase.org/forums/topic/suggestion-to-ck-regarding-donations#post-1641
I can’t understand why Automattic doesn’t send her a $5-10k donation… bbPress would lose so much momentum if she stopped contributing.
In reply to: plugins in my-plugins not installingWhat are the permissions of the folders in your /my-plugins/ folder?
In reply to: Install.php not includedWhere did you download the files you uploaded?
Also, on your local desktop… is there a folder /bb-admin/ with the file install.php in it?
In reply to: stast.php?You don’t have to edit every page in the theme… if you leave a file out of your theme, it will automatically pull the relevant file from /bb-templates/kakumei.
In other words, don’t worry about stats.php! I never do…
In reply to: Search – Relevant Post Links BrokenI have a test install using version 1.0, and search result links seem OK on there.
Could you try deleting your search.php file (back it up first!) and making sure your kakumei under /bb-templates/ is using the latest version? If that doesn’t work, then definitely file a ticket…
In reply to: Search – Relevant Post Links BrokenOh you’re right… sorry I hadn’t noticed that before. I haven’t had problems with the search before myself (it could be b/c I’m still using the 0.9 branch).
Here’s a sample search that works OK for me?
http://boards.weddingbee.com/search.php?q=weddings
I’d be curious if there was still an issue once the search.php file was deleted or updated… if so, then it could definitely be a broader issue!
In reply to: Search – Relevant Post Links BrokenIt sounds like an issue with the search.php file in your template. You may be using a template from 0.9 that isn’t compatible with bbPress version 1.0 (or vice versa).
Try either deleting it, or replacing it with the standard template from Kakumei:
http://svn.automattic.com/bbpress/trunk/bb-templates/kakumei/search.php
