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Re: Is BBPress Any Good?

Hello,

Notice : there is no pun intended in what follow, no troll intended, no critic, no aggressive talk and so on.

Pat1953 question is an interesting one, a question that I asked to myself sometimes.

The « problem » with BBpress is that for an average user (perhaps it’s different for developers) there is no clear direction about where the software is going.

I was very early WP user (and I’m still a very happy WP user) so when BBPress appears a lot of years (in internet time) ago, i tried it.

Then I used several other package more polished, more feature packed and so on.

I came back to BBPress learning that Automattic was founded hopping this could mean a strong development for the forum software and hopefully a real integration with WP.

What is strange with BBPress is that despite it’s a rather old forum software, it is still (from a user perspective) far behind scripts that are developped by a single guy (for example in the WP world, Simple :Press is far more sophisticated and integrated) and it has a very strange way of describing it self.

For example reading The Philisophy it’s written “Put the user first”… despite the fact BBpress is now probably the only forum script without any editor (even a BB code functionality requires a third part plug in), the only one which end users are supposed to know a little bit of HTML.

The integration with WP is also a very strange aspect. By integration I’m not talking about sharing users base and connection, but real semantic integration.

WP lacks a forum part. I maintain a personal website since now close to 10 years and it’s clear for me now (it was not clear at first) that comments, and forum discussions are not the same things, and that they address different needs.

A comment will be buried in the weblog archives after a few days so finding it will be near impossible for a classic visitor.

On the other hand, forum post are better ordered, easier and more natural to find out and son on.

So if I write a blog post about my holidays and two readers answer “cool, it seem it was great”.. comments are exactly what I need.

If I write a blog post about a very interesting thing that will be still of a great interest two years later (even two months later) its better to redirect people to a forum topic, because the discussion will be interesting and deserve to be kept and easy to find out.

So after many years of WP use, I think BBpress is a required integrated part of WP.

But nothing is very clear in BBpress documentation about where the project is heading.

Luc

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