I am also a fan of keeping bbPress as its own software entity. However, I would not care if it was available as a plugin to WP by default, but could be installed stand alone as well.
It just might be a little more difficult to market it as a forum in the mainstream if it is hidden away as a plugin with an optional checkbox to just install as a forum and not a blog. Just my 2 cents on that.
Oh, and not a big fan of TinyMCE myself. But I’m old school. I think the masses generally like crap like that… 
Making it optional would of course be the way to go.
We use the bbpages plugin and simply do some url rewrites in htaccess to make the urls prettier.
It doesn’t matter that nobody reads them, as long as they agree to them…
Welcome! I’m fairly new myself. It isn’t the busiest forum, but folks are very helpful.
We invested in bbPress since it was open-source and we could take it whatever direction we wanted. I would recommend the same for those here worried about future support (if you like the product).
If you still want to move to another forum software, I would first pick a new platform… and then find out if they have a import utility. If they do, find out the format of data required and build a script to dump the data from bbPress in that format.
If you are not able to do this yourself, hire a programmer. Someone fluent in MySQL and php/perl should be able to pull this off fairly easily.
kriskl – You could always go with version 9.06. Most of the plugins work with 9.0x versions right now, no need to wait for the developers to upgrade to 1.0x. Then once the plugins catch up, upgrade to 1.0x.
We run 9.0x right now and have no problems so far (beyond a few cosmetic tweaks) with any of the plugins we are using… which is about 20 or so.
I don’t think bbPress is going anywhere. It is a great little piece of community software. If WP decides to stop supporting it, I bet someone (maybe one of us?) will pick it up and fork off into a new direction for it.
Just today I got an email from someone who visited my bbPress site and they wanted to know what software I was running. They said they really liked it and was hoping it was a plug-in to WP so they could run it. It is feedback like this that WP needs to hear…
I’m a new bbPress user for about 10 months now. I’ve been promoting bbPress in all the other forums I participate in. Love the product and would love to help out in any capacity I could.
I work for myself as a web publisher. I’m a developer at heart (Computer Engineer), but I mostly do community management and marketing these days.
Would not even know where to begin in regards to where I could help. I would like to see the product get a bit more mainstream usage. Every forum I bring it up in or recommend it, no one seems to know anything about it. I find myself sticking up for it against the big hitters like vBulletin, etc. Perhaps a volunteer marketing/advocate role might be useful…
Regards,
Max
Thanks for this plugin snippet. This is the beauty of this software… so elegant and easy to modify.
There is also a plugin called “user photo for bbpress” that uploads an image. It also does some resizing, etc.
I have it working on my site, and I am looking into hacking it for use on posts/topics.
Good suggestion CK, worked like a charm!
Good advice ChrisHajer. Helped me get mine working.
