[@daveshine Participant 13 years, 1 month ago]

@bollocks187

I don’t agree here. SimplePress has do many features for a lot of users/use cases. Yes, it works, it’s active developed and maintained. I tested the new 5.0 beta two weeks ago and it’s still feature overload and a totally different user interface different from “normal” WP… And regarding translation they don’t go with WP standards here and so until they fix some things I could not get it into German. Old 4.x branch is no option because I need optimized code for a new project and also future-proof with WP 3.3+

bbPress — I only mean the plugin version 2.x — on the other hand is really simple but has all I need. It works with almost any theme/framework and I could easily tweak it via CSS. This is a big advantage. Performance-wise it’s really leightweight and future-proof with WP because of custom post types for forum contents.

YES, I know it has not so many features – a few could be added via plugin add-ons – and I assume a lot more will come in the next weeks or month.

IMHO bbPress 2.x is best for small to middle-range communities, best for simple support forums and such. If I need a full packed forum solution with ALL the many and big features I almost always will use a third-party solution like Vanilla, IPB or new XenForo. These have clean style and great UI in frontend AND backend. And with some work of integrating could be work together with WordPress too. — Just look at the newly launched support forum by iThemes.com – they use IPB Forums and it’s great for such a big community.

However, there are some great new bbPress forums out there, see at devpress.com, wpcandy.com, support.pippinsplugins.com, getshopped.com etc. So the bbPress plugin has already proven to manage such communities and they’re doing great.

I vote for bbPress and at the same time have much respect for the work of the Simple:Press devs but just would not use their system!

-Dave