[@johnhiler Member 16 years, 9 months ago]

@grassrootspa – It sounds like there are two different issues being discussed:

1) bbPress needs a Facebook connect feature

2) That feature (along with a bunch of others) should be in the core

1) FB Connect

On the first point… typically the way new features get built is to either:

* build it yourself, or to

* hire someone to build it for you.

The third path is to try and convince others to build it for you for free… but I’ve very rarely ever seen that work.

I’ve actually read stats that show that Facebook Connect can greatly uptick registration:

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/facebook-connect-still-tiny-will-grow-fast

So it may be worth building. But it’s very very difficult to convince someone to develop plugins for free, especially when we don’t have many (any?) active plugin developers… so that basically just leaves the options to build it yourself or to hire someone to build it for ya.

If you tell the developer that it will be open source, maybe they will discount their fee? Or you could ask other users to contribute to the fee…

2) All/most major features should be in the Core

WordPress has put a ton of features into the Core. It’s gotten to the point where even smallish sites can’t run without a caching plugin:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001105.html

It’s not just CPU – the latest versions also eat up lots of memory just to serve up a single page:

http://www.oceanlight.com/log/wordpress-28-memory-usage-and-bloat.html

I’m not sure if this Canonical Plugins initiative would help reduce this bloat or not:

https://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/canonical-plugins/

We don’t have to predict that moving most features into the core will increase bloat and slow down servers… it’s already happened on the WordPress side of things. I think most smaller blogs don’t mind – you can just add caching and be fine for a while. It’s a lot harder for larger sites… I’ve wrestled with scaling my blog, and I’m on a dedicated server. But Matt mentioned that scaling is not really an issue, so I must be missing something:

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/08/28/podcast-25-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/

I think it will be a lot harder to cache bbPress than it will be to cache WordPress, since community sites update so many more times than to a blog. So the WordPress strategy to put a lot of features into the core and address scaling through a caching option… probably won’t be as effective on the bbPress side of things. So that makes it even more important to keep the bbPress core clean.

In any case, I don’t want to be a downer here – there’s still hope for the bbPress platform, if we can unite around keeping the core engine “simple, fast, and elegant” (especially fast!!). If not, then it will be tough to keep the platform viable and we risk losing what progress we’ve made so far.