[whitewall]

It would nice to get links to your BP & WP intergrations.

[whitewall]

We still haven’t given up with this, after taking a look at the BuddyPress plugin this combo seems even more interesting and maybe even something we could put some extra effort and coding resources to get things sorted out and working in a way that fits into our plan. I’ll keep you informed.

[whitewall]

Thanks for the very informative reply _ck_,

The reason I got interested in bbPress is not that we are trying to cut corners or find a cheap solution. It’s more like we would like to find a very simple and a lightweight bulletin board without built-in options we actually do not need. And somehow bbPress 0.9 looks much like what we are after.

Our forum has been running on phpBB since 2001 and the software has had it’s well-known problems. We have also tested the vBulletin – we have even the commercial license and have used lots of time and effort to make our other extensions work with it. But at the end vBulletin has too many options and it is too complex for our needs. We don’t need all those options it offers – we need a simple solution which would integrate nicely into our website.

We have already two dedicated servers (actual machines, not virtual ones), one handles the www-stuff (running apache…) and the other serves as the database server. Right now we have only the phpBB running with a couple of scripts of our own so I guess there’s resources more than we need.

The search issue would be solved by using Google’s search, that’s what we use right now with the phpBB but the lack of caching may be an issue.

Maybe we should keep searching the ultimate BB solution for us or try to customize the phpBB3 to fit our needs and figure out some non-WP solution for the WordPress post commenting.

[whitewall]

Thanks for the replies.

We have had some performance issues also with phpBB so far, especially with the latest topics and phpBB2’s search system. Also phpBB is too complex for our usage because we need to customize the board for our needs and integrate it into our webzine and other scripts we will use in our website’s next version.

Our combination would be a wordpress installation for a webzine which will be managed by only a small number of our editors but it would be nice to have all our registered users to comment the posts logged in with their accounts.

Then the bulletin board should be readable by all visitors but posting is for only the registered users. We should have our 52 forums categorized in 5 or 6 different groups. And there are also various private forums which should be readable and writeable only by a certain user groups. I guess this is not fully supported by bbPress or it’s plugings yet?

Then we would customize the user profile page and user registration and management system into our own, because there will be paid “VIP” members and free registered users and users should be also categiorized in different groups. Also we have our own solution for the private messaging. I guess all this could be done outside the bbPress.

There are also few scripts of our own such as event calendar, classified ads, galleries etc. which would use the same user management / login system.

So the main usage of bbPress would be handling the forum posting, editing and basic forum stuff and together with WordPress and our own extensions they would make a nice platform for a social networking online community. Maybe some of these customizations and extensions of ours would even be possible to publish as a plugins when they’re ready and working.

We have studied also vBulletin and SMF but so far bbPress seems to be the best bb for our needs.