[_ck_]

Actually, the way categories are done in bbPress is in part done for backward plugin compatibility with 0.9 (which will likely be around quite awhile, at least a year, due to it’s performance over 1.0)

And the way it works is just fine too – just because you don’t immediately see the solution you want to breakdown the categories before or after the loop, doesn’t mean it’s not there. bbPress 1.0 truly does understand that a forum is a parent of another and if it’s a category holder for it – the data is just not presented outside of loop form because no-one has needed/asked for it yet. Very easy to write a plugin to present the forum data any way you’d like, and using a single carefully crafted mysql query, you can literally walk the reverse chain of post->topic->forum->category.

If you want forums broken down into categories with say three categories and three tables, either write a plugin or do it in the template to build a new array of $forums[1], $forums[2] etc. But don’t change the original way bbPress works to return $forums as all the forums or it will break existing plugins.

These kinds of feature growing pains were also present in WordPress, I can assure you – I’ve been using WP since 1.5 and I really long for the good old days of 2.0-2.1. The problem is that big leaps tend to break big things, or make them overly complex. WordPress 2.7 is a perfect example of things going very, very wrong with care towards backward compatibility and massive feature bloat, even worse than the 2.3 cookies and tags changes.

bbPress 1.0 is getting more things right from the start than WordPress did – cookies, tags, object cache, are all the more advanced methods right off and will save some headaches for plugin developers down the road (not so much for us 0.9 plugin developers).

Everyone has a different view of what’s missing in bbPress – from my standpoint the two biggest problems are 1. search sucks (so does WordPress’s after half a decade still) and 2. the ability to move posts between topics really needs to be done in the core asap so plugins know how to deal with moving targets.

ps. it’s “her” plugins not “his”

pps. you should be impressed how easy it was to make the topic/forum row affected instead of the title in Unread Posts – I can’t think of any other software that would be so easy. Hidden Forums is another example of the power of bbPress’s filter design.