[Matt Mullenweg]

I think this is worth discussing since it seems to be a core philosophical issue that comes up a bunch, with people citing text I wrote for the about page!

The general rule we’ve followed in WordPress, which has been successful for user adoption, has been that something is “core” functionality of it is something the vast majority (80%+) will appreciate, or if it something that makes WP more robust even if they don’t care about it (revisions), or if it’s something we want to promote because we think it will make WP or the web an intrinsically better place (oembed).

Something might be a hugely popular plugin but not perfect for core because: it ties in a commercial service (Akismet), it needs to update more frequently than core does (faster dev cycle), or it adds more overhead than is worth it. For the last, we can often bring in the bare minimum or framework into core and leave the rest as a plugin (podcasting support in WP, and PodPress, or SEO improvements we make).

A bonus of core is that (in theory) the code gets better reviewed, can be relied on by new plugins to be there and build on, and maintained as part of the overall package. It also often brings new folks who may have just worked on plugins before into improving core which increases exponentially the impact of their work.

Of course there is lots of common sense along the way, this is just meant as a general framework for approaching the problem.

[Matt Mullenweg]

_ck_ maybe my tastes have changed? It’s not a perfect name but it does have historical significant and attachment for me. The integration will be the completion of the arc that started with my first checkin, because I felt the data structures of author-started versus user-started discussions were fundamentally different, and I could do it much faster on a DB structure just like minibb, which is what we used to use on WordPress.org and one of the first forums I really liked. (After attempting vBulletin and phpBB a number of times.)

We also have a history of major changes in 0.1 releases. We might indulge in a little bit of inflation with a 2.0.

I’ve been wondering that if addition to being part of the plugin directory for people already using WP, we could offer a pre-bundled download here on bbPress.org that could set up WP + bbP seamlessly so from a user experience point of view they’re still getting a “standalone” piece of software, just with a far more robust admin and update system. (Just a thought, we’ll figure it out when we get there.)

[Matt Mullenweg]

Here’s the link:

https://bbpress.org/blog/2010/07/wordpress-integration/

[_ck_]

It will take me a little while to find the original post but years ago you said you didn’t like the bbPress name.

If I can’t plead with you for a name change for a completely different forum program (it will likely share 10% or less of the original code) than at least don’t call it 1.2

1.2 has way too many implications that it’s a minor upgrade to 1.1 when in reality it’s a major overhaul (most especially if you aren’t running WordPress or WordPress 3).

All themes, plugins, hacks, advice will be invalidated.

That’s not a x.1 to x.2 update!

[Matt Mullenweg]

I rather like the bbPress name. The reason TalkPress was registered for a hosted service was to avoid the confusion we have between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. (Which I would not repeat if given the opportunity.)

As I spelled out in roadmap discussions before, better integration with WordPress is the single most important item for the future of bbPress.

(Trimming the rest of this to turn into a blog post.)

[Matt Mullenweg]

_ck_, why did you delete your post showing the bug? Is it fixed already?

With regards to the bugs you pointed two, there has been nothing urgent enough to push a 3.0.1, all fairly minor or affecting just a few people, hence the “no rush” on the bugfix release. We’ll probably roll one up next month, or if any security issues come up. You cannot deny that 3.0 is the most stable release (and has had more adoption, 10 million downloads and counting) we’ve ever done in WordPress.

_KB_, could you you start a new thread with any outstanding questions you have?

[Satish]

I will check out the cookie thing and post here again.

I am using WordPress 3.0 and bbpress 1.0.2, on a test site and I am facing the exact same problem as outlined by @jmharrington.

_ck_, I have another question, for which I don’t want to open another thread – because people may get annoyed.

I read this whole – “bbpress as standalone v/s plugin”, instead of understanding things, after some point of reading things, I got confused. I am so confused now to whether I need to wait till the plugin is released or can I go ahead and install present release? The problem is, I want to know – if I will be able to upgrade to plugin version later easily without loosing the current thread entries, users etc. ?

I tested almost all the forum software available and have settled with bbpress because its easy for users to understand and use.

[namelesshorseman]

Hi Kevin,

Are you aware of any plugin for bbPress that forces all registration through a local WordPress install? I can’t seem to find it through google etc.

If not, if I search (through NetBeans / Eclipse + PID) for all strings of bb-login.php or register.php will I find them all?

Or is the easiest way to simply change the header to not show the defualt Login + Register form, and forward people onto the wordpress pages?

Thanks,

Tomek

[_ck_]

I’ve just tested bbPress 0.9 with WP 3.0’s cookies and the Freshly Baked Cookies plugin DOES work properly.

Just make sure your cookie paths for WordPress and bbPress are pointing the same place (ie. /) which was always required for proper integration anyway and is not done by the plugin but inside wp-config and bb-config – see the numerous integration guides around bbpress.org

Make certain you are using version 0.0.4 of the plugin or higher which supports the newer kind of WordPress cookies in use since WP 2.8

[ZKuJoe]

I was using WordPress for a while but I prefer forums over blogging software so bbPress was the best of both worlds! I just altered the default theme to look more like a blog. Let me know what you think.

http://www.jmd.cc

[Satish]

Awesome site. Awesome design.

[_ck_]

Is it possible to copy over the “stats” code from the WP plugin section to bbpress.org, or is it more complex than that?

ie. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/stats/

vs. https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bbpress-signatures/stats/

Even without the fancy graph, just the little History section would be handy.

I’m debating doing another full survey of active bbPress installations by the end of this year despite it’s replacement, but it’s still easy to believe it’s well over 10,000 – might even be 20,000 or higher if the growth has become exponential.

ps. somewhat related: the tag import (from readme.txt) in the plugin section has been broken since the bbpress.org 2.0 upgrade

[_ck_]

Actually 3.0.1 is long overdue, either hiding the bugs or just ignoring them, I’ll be polite and not assume the motivation. I just hope people aren’t being made to suffer just to win the bet:

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?groupdesc=1&group=severity&milestone=3.0.1&order=priority&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&row=description

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?groupdesc=1&group=severity&max=1000&milestone=Awaiting+Review&order=priority&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&row=description

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?groupdesc=1&group=severity&max=1000&milestone=3.1&order=priority&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&row=description

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?groupdesc=1&group=severity&max=1000&milestone=Future+Release&order=priority&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&row=description

[Matt Mullenweg]

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good / Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PipX3l1tEeU

I’m sorry if anyone feels surprised by the roadmap of having bbPress start to become a WordPress “core plugin” in the 1.2 timeframe, it was discussed (and posted to the blog) in the December 9th and 30th meetups, to a healthy debate that raised some of the same issues that have been brought up here.

It breaks my heart to see JJJ and PeteMall who are just getting started have to absorb the negative energy for 5-6 years of decisions they had nothing to do with so if like “wtfmatt” above you want to ascribe all of that to me I’m happy to bear the brunt of it. Let’s let them experiment, try something new, and see what happens. Then we can channel our worries (oh noes, this will break everything!) into positive outcome (you forgot an action in the template which breaks my plugin, here’s a two-line patch to fix backward compatibility).

We have to be careful with our words because they can have a demotivating effect beyond what you can know, which could stagnate bbPress’ development (again).

Finally, there is obviously some pent-up umbrage over many decisions that have been made in the history of bbPress, and I think it would be healthy to talk about those and do a post-mortem to see what we can learn from them. However this thread has already become tainted, and we don’t have message threading here, so it’d probably be best to start a new thread per issue. Tag it with “formatt” and I promise I’ll reply as thoughtfully as I can.

It’s a Sunday but I’m here again. Despite everything bbPress holds a special place in my heart as it was the first project I wrote from scratch applying everything I had learned from working on b2 née WordPress.

[John James Jacoby]

@gswaim If it comes down to name calling or aggression, that’s always an option, but usually the last one if we can all help it. Fortunately the moderation team over here is fantastic, so no worries there.

The decision to allow Pete and myself the opportunity to do the bbPress plugin conversion wasn’t only Matt’s to make, and was agreed on by a committee of all of our peers running the 3.org initiatives, in #wordpress-dev on freenode, and on the WordPress development blog.

The reason it’s bbPress 1.2 rather than bbPress 2.0 (at least as it stands today) is because part of the coding standards we adhere to is not inflating version numbers. Could always see if everyone agrees to inflate based on the amount of new code going in, but I don’t think that’s my decision to make, and I would wager that it’s unlikely to happen? Been wrong before though.

[johnhiler]

“I don’t get what you all want bbPress to do differently that would even require a new standalone version. I’ve asked that before, and there’s no answer; just frustration.”

I thought there were several pretty solid answers above, but I’ll give my take here. For me, it’s mostly about performance. bbPress (especially the 0.9 branch) is fairly fast. As the bbPress frontpage puts it, “bbPress is lean, mean and ready to take on any job you throw at it.” I agree!

WordPress is powerful and has many fantastic plugins and themes. But I don’t think many people would argue that it is lean and mean. It requires caching in order to have a reasonable number of queries and/or loading time.

When someone asks me if they should use WordPress, I always recommend they use a heavyweight hosting package. With bbPress, this hasn’t been the case. Now with a plugin version, that will change.

In any case, I’m not your target audience: I use bbPress to run larger sites. Most people who want a forum will have small forums. They will be perfectly happy with a bbPress plugin – in fact, happier because it will be easier to integrate.

But it won’t scale easily without lots of caching and expensive hardware. That’s why I prefer a standalone.

“In all honesty, all this back and forth is tiring, and all it’s doing is taking the team of people that are here to help keep bbPress alive, and make us the enemy to the people that are just happy to see life again. That, and it’s taken our ability to communicate news to the bbPress community away from us, and instead forced us to try and put out this fire for the past 4 days.”

I totally respect your right to take bbPress and “buddyPress” it into a WordPress plugin. My only request has been to use a different name.

[chrishajer]

To file a bug, go to http://trac.bbpress.org and log in with a wordpress.org login.

Also, you never mentioned https/SSL before. Maybe looking through these posts will help:

https://bbpress.org/forums/tags/https

https://bbpress.org/forums/tags/ssl

[namelesshorseman]

Ok, after reinstalling manually (I was using softaculous before), manual integration with wp, reinstallling again without integration, etc., still nothing works.

I’ve also tried installing in a folder that doesn’t have a wordpress install, just to see. Still the same. Every time, without fail, it tries to find a path such as, if installed in “forums”, it finds “forums/forums”. If installed in “sub/forums”, it finds “sub/forums/sub/forums”.

Where is the issue? I’m getting a little bit frustrated with ‘fresh-out-of-the-box’ software not working!? I appreciate open-source software, and would love to solve this bug for others as well, but I need help finding it first!

[KimJCastleberry]

Hey Chris, thanks for this info. I was struggling to figure out what part of W3 Total Cache causing the forum to report “Please complete your installation before attempting to include WordPress within bbPress” any time I attempted to use it. Turns out it was the JS Minify stuff which I checked after seeing your post. Thanks for sharing!

[xarzu]

I did everything I thought I should do.. Still, it does not seem that when a blog is made there is an automatic form addition. Isn’t that how this is supposed to work? It seems it is just cookie settings and sharing user ID and passwords

[_ck_]

_ck_… you’d rather let bbPress die than let it be reborn and successful as a plugin?

To clarify, I’d rather see the name “bbPress” be retired than recycle the name for another purpose when there are years of development and history already in existence.

I have no problem with you/automattic/whomever making a new forum program, zero problem with it and I honestly wish you the best.

My problem is calling it “bbPress” when it has virtually nothing to do with the original bbPress project. Even worse, it’s being called bbPress 1.2 which is downright weird. 1.2 implies updates to 1.1 – but this is a complete rewrite into something else.

The only reasons I can conclude why it’s being called bbPress is because Automattic/Matt already owns the name, and y’all can’t think of another name or simply don’t want to bother.

Like I said before, and feel it’s worthy of explaining again: What if the WordPress core was suddenly completely re-invented on a whim, breaking all compatibility, and it was simply called “WordPress 3.1”. Wouldn’t that be really dumbfounding and confusing to the community?

@gswaim – the reason why this topic isn’t being closed, is because this is the most conversation we’ve EVER had about bbPress’s future/politics. Even during the backPress changeover we had nothing really like this, just bits and pieces. Matt would make a decision and we’d hear about it a month later during an interview or speech.

I believe this talk/venting is good and healthy as long as it’s not done by attacking individuals personally.

And I’d rather see it all focused here in this topic than a dozen topics eventually created on the subject, (especially since after all these years we still do not have a topic merge function in the api).

But if you want it closed in the hopes it will end people’s feelings on the subject, that’s not really how people behave/think is it?

[xarzu]

In the FORUM dashboard, I found under settings, “WordPress Integration”

[xarzu]

(continued)

Making a new Blog post does not create a new forum topic. Shouldn’t it?

Creating a new catagory in the Blog does not create a new forum group in the bbpress forum. Shouldn’t it?

It seems that the users are sync’ed. I mean if someone logs on to the blog, their user ID works on the forum.

How do I further link up the Blog and the Forum.

[willcrain]

I think that it was a cookie issue… after a number of different changes, uninstalls and reinstalls it seems to work fine. Not really sure what was going on but it seems to all work now… hopefully it stays that way…

thanks though for the help… i am sure that i will have some further questions

thanks again

[John James Jacoby]

Again, just too many of the same points to repeat myself, but bbPress standalone isn’t going to be “unsupported”, it just isn’t going to see any additional features, which is exactly what I think most of you want. Correct me if I’m wrong here?

If I wasn’t on my iPad I’d quote myself volunteering personally to commit any bug fixes to the 1.1x branch of code if anything comes up, but again, that went totally unresponded to.

All of the things I’ve offered to do, to help continue the 1.1x branch of standalone code in addition to creating the 1.2 plugin, have gone totally unacknowledged. If you want to be able to do it yourself, you’ll need to have the experience to understand that the code you write is responsible for powering millions of sites around the world, and that you can easily create global chaos with one click of a button. Call me melodramatic, but in environments like WordPress.com, it’s very true. My experience over the past year has had me much more close to that kind of environment, particulalrly with BuddyPress.

A year ago I felt keeping bbPress as a standalone made sense because a year ago I didn’t comprehend what was coming in WordPress, particularly 3.0 where custom post types have made much more possible. I also had less experience with BackPress, and don’t get me wrong; BackPress is awesome, but bbPress won’t reach its full potential until it’s a plugin for 25 million other websites.

Kevinjohn, I’m sorry but you’ve got a knack for twisting words around and quoting things totally out of context. That’s not really fair, and I wouldn’t do it to you or anyone else so I’d appreciate the same.

I don’t get what you all want bbPress to do differently that would even require a new standalone version. I’ve asked that before, and there’s no answer; just frustration.

bbPress has always been an Automattic endorsed project, and considering without Matt it wouldn’t exist, or have a trac, an svn, or core developers thus far, it seems like he’s the one who’s earned the ability to make decisions on the future of the project. If you call me believing that to be true drinking that Kool Aid, I’m happy to do it because I believe Matt and Automattic and bbPress has earned that from me. If Matt wanted to abandon bbPress completely and close up shop, he could, and someone could graciously keep it alive by forking it. None of that stuff, should make anyone this upset.

My employment status or relationship with Automattic aside, I’m happy, blessed, and consider it a great privilege to have the trust of Automattic and the surrounding community to take this on, even if some of you don’t understand why it’s me, or why now, or why a plugin.

Regarding TalkPress, the main reason it’s named differently is to avoid the confusion people have with WordPress.org and WordPress.com. bbPress is the opensource forum software of choice for WordPress users. If any of you want to help the plugin work on top of backpress, patches welcome and I’m open to the idea. Otherwise, I’d wager 60% or more of the support questions regarding bbPress are incorporating it with WordPress. It’s been said in this topic already, but making it a plugin alleviates those issues, and still allows everyone to keep loving bbPress.

In all honesty, all this back and forth is tiring, and all it’s doing is taking the team of people that are here to help keep bbPress alive, and make us the enemy to the people that are just happy to see life again. That, and it’s taken our ability to communicate news to the bbPress community away from us, and instead forced us to try and put out this fire for the past 4 days.

Quite frankly, it all kinda sucks.

I get that the reality (for some of you) of switching bbPress to rely on WordPress instead of BackPress doesn’t sit well or even make sense, but I promise you it does. I might even have a trick that will help make the admin area a little more familiar. But 1.2 isn’t going to use BackPress anymore. Instead it’s going to use WordPress. bbPress itself is getting lighter, and we inherit all the eyes and updates that WordPress has had that BackPress hasn’t. That alone, if you ask me, is more than enough reason to be thankful for this move. If you need it super optimized, we’ll inherit all the caching plugins for WordPress. If you need bells and whistles, we get WP plugins. There is too much to gain, to not have bbPress be a WP plugin.

The existing standalone committers, are doing a great job already. There are very few trac tickets to work through in terms of bug fixes, and most of the enhancements would naturally get fixed by making it a plugin.

So… I want to say again, your passion and enthusiasm is something I want, and appreciate. If any of you are going to WordCamp Savannah, I’ll gladly discuss this over drinks and dinner. Whatever you need, I want to make it happen for you, but the name isn’t changing, Myself and the team are going to support the standalone with security updates as needed. Since I have commit access, I’m happy to commit fixes as needed because I’ve been trusted with that ability and I want everyone happy with a safe and functional piece of software, plugin or standalone.

I also, typed this out entirely on my iPad over the course of an hours worth of “leisure time.” if that doesn’t say you have my attention and commitment, I dunno what does.