[chrishajer]

Also, in general, bbPress, WordPress, most modern forums and modern blogging platforms use a database to store the data for the site. There are files on the filesystem as well, but in addition to those, there is almost always data stored in a database. In anything other than a simple static site (and with systems that use flat files rather than a database for data storage) you’ll find that there is almost always a database involved.

You’ll see on this page that there are some flat file systems, no database required, but most forums and content management systems and blogging platforms use a database back-end for storage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_content_management_systems