Re: What's happening with bbPress?
@yutt (or is it Skull Man?) & Dailytalker:
I agree 100% with your points. ‘Simplicity is a feature’ and ‘less is more’ are great slogans, but it’s impractical to require someone to find/research/download/upload/configure zillions of plugins to do extremely basic forum tasks that are taken for granted with other programs. I want a stable forum program that contains basic features that aren’t going to stop working if a plugin developer walks away or won’t update them to work with future bbPress builds. I love bbPress but find it just too stripped-down and feature-less out of the box. Would be great to see more optional features you can use or turn off like Gravatars. The default text input interface in-particular leaves much to be desired.
Plugins like Topic Views should be incorporated into the base feature-set of BBpress as well as things like Widgets and the ability to edit themes or plugins from within the admin.
I am not a professional programmer and really admire and appreciate those who develop plugins, such as NightGunner5, Paul Hawke, Michael Adams etc. Going out on a limb here, I would guess it would not be too difficult to incorporate SOME of the more popular plugin features into the Core (especially focusing on _ck_’s best stuff as she will likely not be back). Again, I’m not talking about building in Nintendo emulators or Weatherbug displays but why the heck should someone need a plugin to display how many times a topic has been viewed?!?
@all:
Something I think base minimalists and more-base-feature advocates like yutt & Dailytalker would all agree on is that that bbPress’s admin should display plugin update notifications like WordPress’s admin does. This would be extremely helpful for everyone, especially when security risks are discovered in plugins one has running.
Haha, I bet even kevinjohngallagher would agree with me on this one!