[kevinjohngallagher]

well Matt’s moving bbPress to be a WordPress plugin, and it already runs the WordPress support forums, so in that effect Automattic aren’t going to lose out. It fulfils all their needs.

And right now, bbPress more than fills my needs for 80% of my forum work; but then it was never intended to fill the other 20%.

I stay here and contribute because it has real potential (I suppose everything does), but the more I dig around, the more I can see bbPress taking off in a big way wiht a bit of care and love, and well, management/planning.

Good luck in your search Terence, best of health to you!

[kevinjohngallagher]

Basically Terence,

If you know you’re way around WordPress and are good at theming or hacking some code into a fucntions.php file, then you’ll find bbPress easy to set up and get going.

Looking into the future of bbPress is never going to help. It doesn’t have a project lead, other than the Wizard of Oz (every 6 months there is a voice from behind the curtain that everyone bows down to). But it’s open source software, it’s never going to go away, and the next version does have some great little fixes.

My biggest suggestion is this: How busy will your forum be, and how much moderation will it need? bbPress fails at helping you moderate your site once it gets very busy.

Knowing it’s faults though, it’s still my go to bit of software for forums where I’m expecting less than 100 posts a day.

Kev

[kevinjohngallagher]

With respect, If you think I’ve sucked up to anyone – especially Matt or Automattic people – you’ve really not read alot of my posts. I’ve been very forward, blunt and vocal about Matt dropping the ball on this, not only on this site but on others.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with you, or anyone else, when you insulting someone’s person. Thats not sucking up, thats just being decent. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.

Matt has messed up. But he’s human, and this is a collaborative effort. You can’t put the blame for everything that goes wrong on one person. Or you can, but in the end you’re only going to alienate yourself from people who have the same goal.

That’s the whole point people, we all built the code and all the plugins

Did “WE”?

You know Matt wrote bbPress right?

You know Matt’s emplyees then fixes bbpress (albeit in an adhoc manner) until bbpress 0.8.3, right?

You know Matt then paid for a ‘full time’ developer for bbPress (Sam Bauers) for a year, right?

Matt is directly/indirectly responsible for more code than anyone else on this project.

Yes, he’s causing more issues than he’s solving right now, and yeah it’s annoying; but insulting his person by saying he doesn’t have Brains or Heart is just childish. And bluntly, unhelpful.

Notice how this site’s Alexa rate is a steady 12k… the entire world is waiting on this mates!

Lets be honest, the entire world isn’t waiting for this. I’ve spent a large chunk of time in Africa volunteering, building schools and basic irrigation. “The World” doesn’t care. We care, but its’ just forum software. Lets look at this in perspective.

Look, if you want Matt/AutoMattic/Developers/bbPress-community/Santa to come together or move forward in a particular direction thats cool. But making grandeous statements like this with no hard facts or suggestions doesn’t help at all. Half of what you said in your second post is so wrong it’s unreal. Honestly, if you want change and you want to help, cool. But don’t just spout facts and conclusions that you’ve made up.

we are on the same team yo!

I… I’m not sure what to say to that.

Can I change teams? Or can we vote people off?

[kevinjohngallagher]

This happens every now and then.

It’s not specific to bbPress as an issue.

You basically want to delete everything and re-upload. Try and do so in passive mode too if you can.

[kevinjohngallagher]

You’ve got define in twice:

instead of define('x','y') you’ll have definedefine('x',y')

I’d start again with a clean bb-congif.php and input the details as required.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Ah BackPress.

Like Marrying my high school sweetheart it was a wonderful idea at the time, that somehow comes back to bite me on the behind every damned day ever since ;-]

(here’s hoping she doesn’t google me!!)

Mr Pelle,

I truly believe that bbPress is a grand little product, it’s so flexible and extendable that it’s potential in unbridaled. if your forum doesn’t requite alot of moderation, then I can’t think of anything better than bbPress.

It’s just hampered by no management and no communication, which I feel only exasperate/exagerate it’s problems. And this comes from the the moany SoB who points them out

bbpress 1.0.3/1.1 (cos we’ve no-one in charge to make the decision to release anything) contains a great number of bug fixes that have plagued bbPress for too long. All small, all annoying and great to get them out of the road. Even if you don’t need the 2 new** features, it will be a good thing when this comes out and you upgrade.

I’m all for pointing out mistakes, and keepingon top of this to geet things released, and maybe get some answers out of someone at some time (Seriously, 6 months per blog post – crazy from the company behind WordPress blogging platform) and then we’ll take stock and see what happens then.

** they’re not new, we’d had them for years as plugins. God himself only knows why we couldn’t have a bug fix release instead, then work on new features. But that requires stakeholders to be consulted and decisions to be made…

[kevinjohngallagher]

Gareth Gates earned a bit over of leway in the Gallagher household for Jordan, but Stuart McCall… y’all are going to hell of keeping him alive/busy for a while longer

Anyway, what you want is to make sure that your bbPress config file has the same info as teh wordpress config file for each of these below

in WordPress

define( 'DB_NAME', 'database_name' );

/** MySQL database username */

define( ‘DB_USER’, ‘user_name’ );

/** MySQL database password */

define( ‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’ );

/** MySQL hostname */

define( ‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’ );

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */

define( ‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’ );

/** The Database Collate type. Don’t change this if in doubt. */

define( ‘DB_COLLATE’, ” );

in bbPress

define( 'BBDB_NAME', 'database_name' );

/** MySQL database username */

define( ‘BBDB_USER’, ‘user_name’ );

/** MySQL database password */

define( ‘BBDB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’ );

/** MySQL hostname */

define( ‘BBDB_HOST’, ‘localhost’ );

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */

define( ‘BBDB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’ );

/** The Database Collate type. Don’t change this if in doubt. */

define( ‘BBDB_COLLATE’, ” );

If they are the same, then I’m a bit clueless right now

[kevinjohngallagher]

A Bradford man eh? I was down there on thursday.

Anyway, welcome to bbPress.

What you want to do here is look at your WordPress config file (wp-config.php) that is already on your website (i am presuming here that you’re wanting to add a forum for appertunity.com – or at least on the same server).

You will see what it has for each of the details that you filled in for the corresponding bb-config.php file. that should give you some insight as to what the database settings should be

[kevinjohngallagher]

Last blog entry here was 6 months ago!

Not a good sign.

It’s always like that though. Back when we had a paid full time developer I didn’t know he existed for the first 3.5 months I was involved in the project.

Management, and Communication of it’s decidions, is the single biggest roadblock of bbpress in going forward.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Gautam,

Can you confirm if this “Greater than” and “less than” nonsense is in the nightly builds, and thus something for us to fix in the latest version, or if it’s down to a hack purely on the bbPress website.

Because it’s getting quite mental.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Is bbPress going to live or morph into something else?

Both. According to Matt, who stated it back in January in the middle of an IRC chat, bbPress will become a WordPress plugin… eventually.

I doubt that’ll happen anytime soon though.

With the release of WP 3.0 just around the corner (I am already running WP3 RC2), what’s going to happen with bbPress then?

Same as what’s happening now. Some good folks will work on code (some community members, some Automattic folks), and we’ll sitin silence not knowing what tomrrow will bring.

Do I install bbPress on WP as a forum and use BuddyPress to access it?

If you’re using BuddyPress, you’re not talking to the people behind the bbPress you’re using. the bbpress that works with BuddyPress is a different beast, and for some reason they decided not to rename it, so we get the support questions and bad rep – constantly!

Or is something going to change and make the combination and integration of all the plugins for each and of WP3/bbPress/BuddyPress all too much of a royal pain in the petutie?

WP/BuddyPress plugins are never going to work with bbPress.

There’s a long answer behind why, but basically, thats a no go.

I wish someone could give me some clarity on the direction bbPress and BudyPress are going.

BuddyPress actually has some great folks who are very communicative and support their community so well it’s unreal. But you’d need to be on the BuddyPress forum for that – as it’s got nothing to do with us.

bbPress, well, we’d all like some communication – but thats never been it’s strong point. Don’t worry, thats not new, and it’s not going to change.

Someone. Anyone?

ECHO ECho Echo echo… etc

[kevinjohngallagher]

would be far better to start a new thread.

Please start a new thread!

PLEASE START A NEW THREAD.

This one started in February 2009, It’s June 2010!!!

[kevinjohngallagher]

would be far better to start a new thread.

Please start a new thread!

[kevinjohngallagher]

One of the major things that bbPress doesn’t do well is make the forum easy to moderate in anyway. 7 clicks and 4 pages to delete 1 user, and no ability to mass delete is mental.

If you have a forum that needs constant moderation for any reason, bbpress might not be the best solution sadly

[kevinjohngallagher]

It looks like the same plugin to me, just themed to match their theme.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Did you change the user’s status via their profile page?

site.com/bbpress_folder/profile.php?id=2&tab=edit

[kevinjohngallagher]

I am not happy about a lot of things with bbPress, specifically it’s management and communication; which have been shockingly bad for 2 years now. I also think tht Matt really dropped the ball on bbPress and then somewhat screwed us over with his comments against the “bbpress community” in his WordCap Keynote speech.

That said:

1) Don’t hide behind a fake profile. We all have opinions, and we all agree and disagree on many things. If you’ve got something to say, and you believe this is the place to say it, have the common decency to put your name to it.

.

.

.

2) One has to differentiate between Matt the person, and Matt the Founder/CEO/Employee of Automattic. I have no doubt that Matt 100% wanted bbPress to succeed and he did help reinvigourate the project for a little while, he just dropped the ball again; but breaking his own rules:

http://ma.tt/2009/08/kill-your-community/

As I said herein the link below, Matt should have delegated bbPress to someone and kept up communication as Matt is an insanely busy dude. There is no doubt that WordPress 3.0 would take priority over bbPress, and there’s all the other pies that Matt has his finger in.

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/from-a-project-management-viewpoint

It’s not for you or me or anyone really to make demands of his or anyone else’s time. We can ask for information, especially really basic information that should be on this website – but Matt the person and Matt the head of Automattic doesn’t owe you/me/anybody anything.

.

.

.

3) I think Matt got it wrong and messed up. He did so a couple of times in a row imo. I think he then did really wrong by us publicly taking a go at the folks who keep this site going – I thought that was underhanded and a total slap in the face to all the moderators (sorry the ONLY moderator) and people who didn’t jump ship. I lost alot of respect for Matt the person when that happened.

I think he continues to allow this to spiral but not communicating with anyone in a moderator or higher position so that some of these same questions can be answered; but bbPress is not his focus, and really, thats his call to make not ours.

It’s not like it wasn’t like this for bbpress1.0’s release and bbPress0.9 release, and as Matt said, the’ve fecked this up before and nothing changes:

We’ve done this before. Relax.

— Matt

— https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/from-a-project-management-viewpoint#post-63315

.

.

.

4) I truly think this post covers my thoughts in a nice concise manner. And before making any posts like this, I strongly suggest reading it:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/whats-happening-with-bbpress/page/5#post-64410

It followed a post by Gautam, who’s done stellar work since Matt’s departure, and was followed by the only moderator left asking a simple question and then Matt leaving the project. I think it shows the difference from where “we” the community are and where Matt is. And that’s ok, we’re all allowed to be in different places.

But posts like this is never going to be helpful.

.

.

.

5) I think it’s very very wrong to state that Matt doesn’t have “heart, soul and brain”. The man is a really nice, wonderfully warm and smart human being. He’s just fracked up on this, and for teh first time in a long time, hasn’t looked at things objectively and help up his hands (which is one of the things I admire most about Matt over the years).

And bro, with all due respect to _ck_, without warning she left the project too and closed down her forum so we couldn’t access the code or discussions on it. I think _ck_ is an amazing amazing developer, and knows bbPress inside out; but I’m not sure on what you’re basing this presumption that she (or any of us) would be better at leading a community based project. _ck_ has in the past shown some signs of not being the happiest bunny when people start asking questions.

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6) I’m still laughing at how childish your fake profile name is. “wtfmatt”. Ha, you really should have just called yourself “impatient13yearold”.

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7) I was trying to reference this earlier. I wrote this alomst 18 months ago now. Crazy how much of it still holds true:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/how-to-help-us-help-bbpress

Take care,

Kev

[kevinjohngallagher]

ooooh bb_update_forum. Awesome find.

thats the difference between someone who can actually code PHP and someon like me.

I’ll have to play with it though, and might ask you for some help, as in some re-ordering will fire that once for each forum is manually updated by an admin. I mean that won’t happen often ofc, but it’s (number of SQL calls my function makes * each function affected).

Currently, and in no way overly optimized, the “forum_family_tree_setup” script uses 2 + (3 * parent) SQL calls per per forum.

Even on my large football forum, (large in terms of number of forums) which has quite deep relationships, this is far less intensive than a recount. If this was to be multiplied by 3 or 4 times though (depending on how many forums are updated with a move), that might cause a hic-up.

I’ll do some benchmarks after the weekend – I’ve got 31 non-England teams to support in the World Cup this weekend

Cheers bro!

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m sure there were a few ones around during 0.9, and one of them may work.

That said, I wrote my own page in PHP which just listed the members from the database. Ideal? far from it. Works though.

[kevinjohngallagher]

do_action( ‘bb_update_topic’, $topic_id ); actually is fired after all the db stuff and not before. Given the code of bb_insert_topic we have:

You’re a Legend.

Once again, Thank You.

I thought it might, but thats at least me down to 4 non-supported major features in my code:

1) Update family tree upon adding/removing forums or changing forums order

(the code is there, the trigger isn’t – right now I’ve just got a reminder in the readme and added it to the daily cron job on my servers)

2) Gives accurate counting for parent child relationship in terms of “total” forums/topics/posts/voices.

(Again, code is there and working, and runs on “recount”, but should also be activated upon adding/removing forums or changing forums order)

3) Addition of “Groups” instead of categories. Again, this is written and working, but I’d need to come up with some form of changeover script.

(Apparently to group forums together, you need to make it’s parent read only. But if you want to make a forum read only but not a ‘header/category/group’ you can’t. Don’t get me wrong it was a great hack by _ck_ when 0.8.3 came out, but man, why roll it into the core without any actual thought!! 0.8.3 was 3 years ago.)

4) Rewrite hooks for moderation to comply with other plugins (specifically to play nice and read yours and Nightgunner5’s), as right now it only natively reads my own plugins, which is daft.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m really not a fan of the colours and layout, but I love that you’ve done so much with it and have a thriving community. From what I can see, signatures and image posting are working really well for you as have Avatars etc.

While my personal taste preffers your Kate Humble forums, its great to see you and your forums doing so well!

Keep us notified of any changes you make too, and well done

[kevinjohngallagher]

oh for goodness sake, that code bug is really getting on my tits.

Driz, the main thing to remember is this. these forums are aimed at making the WordPress support forums. Once you try and venture outside the functionality they have, you’re going ot hit issues which will need you to be able to read/write/investigate the source PHP files.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Ok, so you’re trying to do something that bbPress can’t natively do.

You’re presuming, and we can all see why, that because this is forum software that it has native parent/child relationships; when it doesn’t really.

I’ve always found the best thing to do is to write my own forum subroutine in a page.

if ( bb_forums( $forum_id ) )

{

while ( bb_forum() )

{

global $forum;

global $forum_id;

print_r($forum);

// I output my own code here using

// $forum->forum_name

// $forum->posts

// To show children of forum

if($forum->forum_parent == $forum_id || empty( $forum_id))

{

//Output code here, it’s a child or you’re on the front page

}

}

}

To re-iterate, I’m coding the above from memory, so if there are errors you’ll need to check them yourself

[kevinjohngallagher]

Wonderful Zaerl mate.

Issue 1:

bb_new_post and bb_new_topic actually cause me a world of issues, because they’re fired before all of the SQL/PHP is fired. It took me about 2 days to work out my copy and pasted SQL was producing different results in the PHP and the actual database.

In the end, I had to move those functions to add_action('bb-post.php') and then test if a topic was passed or not.

(I’m guessing a little that this might have something to do with the wp_cache functions, as in certain places we call wp_cache_flush and wp_cache_delete before the bb_new_post actions)

bb_update_post though seems like its exactly what I want, though am a tad concerned that the same thing will happen – at least if I have access to $_POST I can hack it.

I’m basically wanting to know when someone changes the name/title of a topic. Which seems very simple to me (in theory).

==========================================================

The second one is a bit more tricky.

I basically have a (half-baked) plugin that deals with the geneology of a forum, with true parent/child n-to-n relationships. For my non-flat websites, this (again half-hacked) plugin has really made my life easier.

Before I release it, I want to make sure I’m covering as many bases as possible, and these have been outstanding bugs for about a year now.

Whenever someone reorders their forums, or adds a new forum, or marks a forum as hidden; I’d like my plugin to know about it. Basically, I want my plugin to be fired AFTER the core has finished what it’s doing, and we’ve no action for that.

But there’s no action or pluggable function that gets called after, thre is only bb_check_ajax_referer and thats called before any processing.

I really apprecaite your help Zaerl mate, if you can think of anyhing else – please shout!

[kevinjohngallagher]

What code did you try on the sub forum pages nad we can try and help