[michael3185]

Just my tuppence worth, but as I said elsewhere, I’ve taken _ck_’s advice and stuck with 0.9. My forum needs aren’t very demanding, I have all the plugins I need and they work fine, and I don’t use WordPress so integration isn’t an issue. I have enquiries from others who want sites and forums building, but static sites rather than blogs. I can use my DTP package and bbPress 0.9 to do everything very quickly, and have excellent stability from both.

I also agree with _ck_’s points about core vs. plugins. From what I can gather, the original idea was to have a fast, secure, and plugin extensible system. Even as a user rather than a developer that makes a lot of sense to me. It means the core quickly becomes more and more stable, and anyone is free to develop whatever they want to hook into it. Brilliant. But putting various functions into the core means that any changes have to be redone by Sam et. al. and re-uploaded, hacked in the core by users, or redeveloped by hooking in a plugin to change the functionality. As everyone has differing needs and opinions, plugins for anything but basic core functions leave open far more options. Anything which is not essential to all users is not a core function. Gravatars, for example, are not required or even wanted by many users.

As to people remembering old versions with fondness, but having moved on with each bleeding edge version, I’d suggest that it’s only those who keep moving on who voice their opinions most in these forums. There are huge numbers of users who’ve built forums with very old packages of all kinds, and when they build new ones they use the old software too. I think it’s important that those who love bleeding edge, along with the challenges and time consuming re-uploading and fiddling around, don’t forget that many people are perfectly happy with what works and see no need to keep reinventing the wheel. After all, how much better really, do all these new ideas and functions appearing all over the web make life? This is probably a point for a philosophical forum, but worth mentioning I think. We seem to spend so much time redoing and redoing, that often purpose is lost in the background noise of being so busy changing everything. We live in a, “Yippee, it’s new!” culture, where anything which doesn’t titillate the mind is ditched for whatever’s next.

New functionality is great if it’s genuinely useful, but I’m glad 0.9.0.5 exists and works so well, and the occasional security update will do fine. Incidentally, I’d quite like to see a separate 0.9 forum. It would save 0.9 users having to wade through all the 1.0 questions and allow us to quickly see what’s relevant.