[@kevinjohngallagher Member 16 years, 4 months ago]

Rootside ::

Has anyone considered the possiblity that Matt is keeping his eyes peeled on the current efforts of some people trying to use nothing but WordPress’ core functions to build a simple forum?

He might be mate, but probably not, as doing so isn’t that difficult at all. I creted a “theme” for WordPress that made it look/work like a forum in essence back in 2008. The same time I made and released the phpBB theme for bbPress. Both were availible on the bbProgress website (which closed last year but there should still be some links on t’internet).

And Justin’s coding one based on the new Custom Post features, which will work alot better than mine did (he actually build one last year too, but had a hard drive crash and lost it).

Basically though, a blog and a forum are different in their “n to n” nature. WordPress relies on a huge amount of caching to try and keep it’s memory intake down, and a customised caching mechanism is essential once you hit any form of modernday traffic. That sort of feature works well on “1 to many” software, but a forum is different. It has to call data differently, and handle multiple parent/child relationships.

Rootside ::

I’m guessing that any WP plugin which makes that kind of thing easy to set up and enhances its functionality would be really lightweight.

No, no way mate The opposite.

I understand the desire to make a WP plugin that is a forum, I can see Matt’s viewpoint on that, but in comparison to bbPress as it stands, it’ll be far from lightweight.

Not only will it struggle with the caching that WP relies on, but you’ll have all the overhead of loading everything in WordPress before hitting any actual forum content (including the WordPress admin sections and plugins).

It’s basically going to be very similar to the BuddyPress “bbPress” plugin, as thats a hacked/stripped version of bbpress1.0 (in general terms it removed BackPress and rewrote the function calls to call WP/buddyPress functions directly). But in order to get it to work, every page has to load WordPress then BuddyPress then bbPress forum module.

Lightweight it ain’t!

Even if the very clever people that work at Automattic and contribute to the community manage to pull a great number of rabits out of hats, there is no way that it will be anything but bloated.

But you know, 90% of folks won’t care. Take Marius (poster above me), he runs a forum about Michael Jackson with aboot 100+ users and maybe 50 topics started a week. He’s not that uncommon to alot of the folks that pass through here (other than that he is allergic to manners). They won’t care in the slightest about the small hit as the chances of them noticing it are going to be slim, and they get access to all the good stuff that comes with WordPress, heck for the most part they’ll get the stuff they think they should from bbPress/Wordpress integration now. For a percentage of people, there will be no downside, even if it’s far from lightweight.

I realise that software moves on, and I realise that as it grows there will be some bloat. Thats the reality of where we are, and WordPress does a really great job of being quick despire it’s bloat. But the sheer difference between a bbP0.9/WP2.5 deeply integrated forum (which has MORE features than we have now) and a bbP1/WP3 deeply integrated forum is unbelievable. Bloated, slower, more prone to errors and less features.

I see why Matt thinks things have to change, i don’t agree with the direction and thats cool, i don’t have to agree, nor does anyone

But really the history of this project has taught us one thing repeatedly: Heading in a direction without planning or a roadmap will definately lead us somewhere else, but we’ll be just as lost. Who knows though, 40 years later he may just lead us out of the desert

Hopefully on Matt’s way up to Montreal he’ll see a burning bush