[chrishajer]

What version of bbPress, WordPress and plugin are you using? Also, the URL to the plugin please.

[gerikg]

daudev, I messed up on step

4 Open bb-config.php (in the bbpress folder) do the same thing here. With the SAME keys you put in the wordpress file put in the bb-config file around line # 41-45. ***You have to add BB_ to the front of the names. Example: BB_AUTH_KEY to all eight.*** Save. Keep the file open for now.

[gerikg]

SpinDoctor, OMG i can’t believe I forgot!!!! thank you I was going insane.

1 When installing wordpress/bbpress do NOT use “www.” Example: use bbpress.org not http://www.bbpress.org and use the same database. You do not need to change the prefix, I prefer you don’t because you’ll run into problem later.

2 Make sure bbpress is in a folder in wordpress. example: wordpress/bbpress/ not on the same level.

3 The folder does not have to be named bbpress, most people make it forum or forums.

*After successfully installing both programs open wp-config.php (in the wordpress folder) file. Around line # 45-# 48 you’ll see define(‘AUTH_KEY’…. go to this URL (https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt) and get the EIGHT keys and REPLACE the FOUR keys that are there. Save. Keep the file open for now.

4 Open bb-config.php (in the bbpress folder) do the same thing here. With the SAME keys you put in the wordpress file put in the bb-config file around line # 41-45. You have to add BB_ to the front of the names. Example: BB_AUTH_KEY to all eight. Save. Keep the file open for now.

5 Clear your cache on your browser. Log into your bbpress dashboard and go to Settings->Wordpress Integration-> WordPress Administrator should be keymaster. Every other option should be member for now. WordPress address (URL) should be the URL again NO www. Blog address (URL) the same as before. The last 3 should be LOCKED if not repeat the steps 3&4.

6 Login to your wordpress dashboard. Go to Plugins->Add New-> search for “bbPress Integration” it should be the first one. Install it and activate.

7 Go to Settings-> bbPress Integration. Enter the bbPress URL without the www. Your plugins URL leave blank. Click on Save Changes. On the bottom box you’ll see some text copy it. Most likely it will say “define( ‘COOKIEPATH’, ‘/’ );”

8 Paste the line in wp-config.php file around line # 16 (MUST be on top. Don’t know why) and paste it in bb-config.php in line # 13 (Must be on top). Save. You can delete the plugin, it’s no longer needed.

9 Clear your cache on your browser and you’re done.

Known Problems

*Two different database, one for WP and one for BBP, does not always work.

*Changing the database prefix. There are tutorials out there that tell you to do it, just don’t.

*Hosting companies that offer free databases, have buggy databases.

*BBpress not being in WordPress folder. I don’t think the plugin takes that into account.

*When you upgrade from an older version (wordpress/bbpress) the XX-config.php files are different than what you already have. Check wp-config.php against wp-config-sample.php & bb-config.php against bb-config-sample.php should be fairly simple.

[Pomy]

ok I’ve taken complete and partial backup for all tables…so what’s next dear chrishajer?

[chrishajer]

yes, it’s possible. I would back up the complete database if you can, but if not, at least the user table and usermeta, because that’s what bbPress will mess with when it tries to integrate. Backup everything first then give it a shot.

[Pomy]

Hi to all………..

I want to integrate bbpress with my existing working blog i.e. http://www.softinfo.info …. is it possible to integrate fresh bbpress to my working blog without reinstall wordpress?

also tell me what kind of database backup i need?

thank in advance!!

[timskii]

This hack redirects non-editing users from their WordPress profile to their forum profile. Set $my_forums_directory to the directory or URL of the forums, and save it as a WordPress plugin.

Sometimes the page headers have already been sent, so wp_redirect() can’t be relied on, and instead the HTML has to perform the redirect.

WordPress users that can edit posts will still see the normal WordPress user screens. Since these screens don’t integrate well, it might be sensible to redirect admin users to /forums/bb-admin/users.php – but I’ve not done that here.

add_action('admin_head', 'my_wp_profile_redirect', 0);



function my_wp_profile_redirect() {

// Based on a part of Kim Parsell's https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hide-dashboard/

global $parent_file, $current_user, $user_login;

$my_forums_directory = "/forums/"; // Set this to the directory or URL of the forums.

if (!current_user_can('edit_posts') && $parent_file == 'users.php') {

$my_profile_destination = $my_forums_directory."profile/".esc_attr( str_replace( " ", "-", strtolower( $user_login ) ) )."/edit";

if (!headers_sent()) {

wp_redirect($my_profile_destination);

} else {

echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url='.$my_profile_destination.'"><script type="text/javascript">document.location.href="'.$my_profile_destination.'"</script></head>';

echo '<body><a href="'.$my_profile_destination.'">View profile</a></body></html>';

}

exit();

}

}

[kevinjohngallagher]

@myballard

this would be the single most important bbPress feature imaginable.

@Ruben S.

right now Facebook rulez the planet the existence of this plugin will kick asses

I totally respect the opinion of these folks, and the others who’ve written similar statements. I’m wondering, if possible, if these people (or others) could back this up with data so we can have a discussion about it and see the real value of something.

@Grassrotspa

Facebook Connect would both be awesome.

Heck, what about Twitter Connect and IntenseDebate Connect as well?

This is the start of it though. So lets be blunt. BBpress, after 2.5 years of development, cant integrate with WordPress, which is one of its advertised features (one may even see major selling points??) – how on earth do you think we’ll be able to keep up with other API’s?

When will 1 API be enough? Got Facebook? Now Twitter. Got Twitter? Now OpenID. Got OpenID? now google. Got Google? How about msn/yahoo (is it still called hailstorm/myPassport or am i showing my age).

Maybe i’ve got this wrong, but BBpress is forum software. Forum’s of this format have been around for 20 years now, and have gotten along with without Facebook Connect. If this has changed, can someone pelase let us know?

Many Thanks to all,

Kev

[kevinjohngallagher]

In an attempt not to derail the “1.1 Feature Poll” thread, I thought i’d cut and paste my comments from there into a new thread. Alot of people have been talking up Facebook Connect, but without actually saying what the benefit would actually be. So lets talk it out, so that people on both sides of the arguement, and those in the middle can make a balanced and reasoned deduction.

======================================================

I’m going to be using quotes from the lovely from the following threads:

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/login-using-facebook-connect

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/11-feature-poll

======================================================

@grassrootspa

“in this day and age people hate having to register a new user name and password for every single site”

I’m not in anyway meaning this in a disparaging way, but this is nonsense. Its the opposite. With email access alot easier now than 10 years ago, with email spam filters improved, with multiple-tabs per browser, with “the average user” used to having to sign into different websites – users are FAR more likely and used to signing up for services than they used to be.

There is a myth that techinical people, who are by far the largest percentage of forum users, project onto the average user; that the average user wants ultra dumbed-down-simplicity and a one-stop-shop coupled with also crazy interaction features.

Its a myth thats been doing the rounds since Flash 4 popped up, or when Flash 5 went really big, or when dHTML became popular or when AJAX became big etc. etc. And yet somehow, these new “omg my users NEED that kk” features all seem to be not quite as needed as we were told after a little while.

“Like it or not, FB is the big social-networking dog out there”

Agreed, totally; and i do like Facebook. But you miss my points mentioned here: http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/11-feature-poll#post-61894.

1) Nothing stays top dog forever. If we were having this discussion 2 years ago we would have been talking about MySpace, before that possibly MSN messenger signings, and defintely before that AoL signing. No-one has made a point about why we should develop something into the core of BBpress that is dependant on the popularity and propriety software of another company.

And lets not forget Facebook has only become the No.1 Social Networking site i the US this past year. MySpace was recieving more pageviews according to Alexa until Feb/March of this year. Maybe lets see if this lasts first? (who remembers AoL?)

Okurt, for example, while is run by google (yet not popular in the western world) is the second biggest social network. What if google pushes that so that it becomes No1. Should we then forget about Facebook Connect because its no longer No1 and demand a GoogleFriend plugin?

2) Facebook is popular only with a certain demographic. I’ve included links to the stats on my previous post, but the sheer percentage of people on facebook that are White, 15-25, High School Educated or higher, and from the Western World (mostly USA and Canada) is staggering. As it stands, creating a Facebook Connect plugin would (statistically) really only benefit White people from North America who had finished High School. Why should that be something that BBpress includes in its core?

“I think all our bbPress sites would see more interactions if FB connect could be used (optionally turned on or off)”

Awesome, what data are you basing this on?

3) If your focussing on the needs of your end user, then surely content should be king. If someone feels strong enough to take part in your discussion then not being able to log in from Facebook probably wont be an issue.

4) Lets say you offered Facebook Connect. The user clicked it, opened a popup that said “please type in your facebook username and password” – how many do you think would automatically do that? We’re constantly reminded to not give out usernames and passwords, and to look out for phishing websites etc etc. So if a user go to a website or forum, and wants to get involved in the conversation, but not enough to sign up, how likely is it that they’ll use FBconnect instead? Can you back this up with data from other forums or is it just anacdotal?

5) The service itself has been woefully rolled out by Facebook. Here’s a quote from Mark Z

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”

That was in February this year, and in that time, they’ve changed the API twice without telling any of the end users. Can you imagine, seriously, BBpress building something into its core that relied on another companies API not changing inbetween BBpress releases? We’d have to release a new version of BBpress everytime Facebook made a change to its API that broke the previous version – which btw, we’ve had 4 such incidents of this year!

6) Beacon. Not sure you know about this, but Beacon collected data from non-facebook websites you went to or linked to or signed into via FBconnect, sent the info to facebook so they could sell the info to advertisers. Yes, while you see the positives of a single sign in, its been used as a Big Brother spyware, or rather was, right up until the class action lawsuit that Facebook lost only 3 months ago – paying out 21million dollars. Orwellian doesn’t begin to cover it.

7) Facebook Connect != New users.

Lets scrap annacdotal Evidence and go with a real live website with stats availible on the internet.

Gizmondo, one of the founding partners of Facebook Connect almost 18 months ago has seen a steady increase of people using Facebook connect, At the start of December it found that circa.21000 page views were through FBconnect – thats just under double what that number was in March of this year. On its own, thats a big number, but the thing is, its roughly 0.6% of page views for the site.

http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/single/-/44615671688/

As popular an idea as FBconnect is, it’s still not that popular in reality. FBconnect gets loaded 50million times a month, a high number (almost 1.5% of facebooks monthly login); but this 50million actually includes every time a page loads with the FBconnect Javascript file, and doesn’t account in anyway for how often its actually used. It is *not* 50million logins with FBconnect a month!

http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/fbconnect.png

If we take Gizmondo as the average (for this example) – which its not, its slightly above average, in that it has technical people and early adopters using its site in a higher percentage, so these numbers should favour FBconnect.

Gizmondo gets roughly 3million page views a month with 700,000 unique visitors. Thats an average of 4.3 page views per person. Now FBconnect counted for 21000 page views at 4.3 pages per person equates to 4884 unique visitors that use FBconnect on one of the partner sites in which its had 18 months to promote the brand linking. Thats a massive uptake of FBconnect on a partner site – of tech savvy people no less – of… drumroll please… 0.7% (not a shock to anyone as i mentioned the figure above).

Do we really, really, think that this is something vital to having people competantly use a BBpress forum?

If 0.7% of your community on your website want to use FBconnect, how many actual people is that?

To put it in context, for every 1000 people that actually post on your forum, 7 will use FBconnect. Thats not 7 new posters, that 7 posters total. We’ve no idea how many of them are new.

So lets take it a step further, what percentage of that 0.7% are users who would not have created an account and signed in if it wasn’t for FBconnect? What if half of those 0.7% aren’t new users, what if half are people who prefer to use one sign-in. Will an increase in traffic of 0.35% really be worth all the time and hassle involved in getting BBpress (which cant even integrate with WordPress – its parent companies flagship product) to integrate with moving target badly run by another company?

Before you advocaate Facebook Connect, ask yourself these questions:

1) What sort of increase in numbers or percentage of posters would make this worth while to me?

2) Am sure that this is the best option for a global product, given that Facebook’s poularity is localised?

3) Am i suggesting a Feature that I myself want?

4) Does BBpress need this feature to actually funciton as a forum, as per the original remit – outlined here: http://bbpress.org/about/features/ ?

As someone who lives in a country where Facebook is 3rd or 4th favourite Social Network (it fluctuates), and just inside the Top 10 of websites visited, it always amazes me when people go overboard about it as if its the second coming. I like it and use it, but every time i ask someone to back up why they think BBpress needs FBconnect all we get is short annacdotal evidence based on their own desire, so lets get past that and have a nice conversation about it

[johnhiler]

Elias – I thought your previous post was excellent, and I agreed with almost 100% of it – including your suggestion around the core plugins structure.

Just wanted to clarify as an unbiased third party (I have zero affiliation with WordPress/Automattic and am not a mod on this board) that your post being flagged as spam was almost certainly just Akismet acting up again.

Posts with links are often flagged by Akismet – it’s happened many times on this forum:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/akismet-4-link-limit-in-posts-or-whitelist

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/where-is-the-option-to-allow-more-links-in-a-post

On a separate note… I don’t think it’s helpful to refer to the future direction of bbPress as a “WordCrapPressy Bloaty Piece Of Unuseable And Totally Overloaded Shit”. I’m super worried about bloat and feature overload too – it’s just that inflammatory language tends to shift the conversation into yelling at each other, rather than focusing on addressing the issues raised.

[Dailytalker]

“Please vote for features which aren’t available yet”

There is only a Tinymce-Editor available but its not compatible with the current bbpress-edition and its not what I am looking for. bbpress should use exactly the same editor as it’s used in wordpress. This would be a further integration step. It is not really nice to use 2 different editors for the forum and for the blog. Therefore please vote for WYSIWYG-EDITOR. The WYSIWYG-EDITOR should contain buttons for links and pictures

Please also vote for FACEBOOK-CONNECT. (The OPEN-ID Plugin does not work with the current bbpress-version and it doesn’t offer facebook-connect as the author is waiting till facebook will join the open-id-project. This may be in 2 years which is a very long time.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I really can’t understand why most people voted for “integration with wordpress”

Well, probably because… Its one of the 7 core features advertised on the feature page: https://bbpress.org/about/features/

Also, its been the number one request for the last two years, and its the number one posted topic for the last two years, and the number one used tag for the last two years and… actually to continute would be flogging a dead horse.

P.S. How bad has Akismet been recently? Not to spark a different conversation but maybe it needs a different way of deciding if Forum posts are spam in regards to teh way it decides if Blog Comments are spam.

[chrishajer]

I really can’t understand why most people voted for “integration with wordpress

I voted for integration because it’s the number one, most common problem here, based on the number of questions, most often used tag, big selling point was “ease of integration” and that promise has been completely unmet. Getting single log in working for bbPress and WordPress, getting the theme to look the same, having access to WordPress functions, all these things are promised by integration, and none of them work unless you light some incense and candles, sacrifice an animal and dance around naked under a silver moon. Then, MAYBE, you can get integration working. I don’t want a single new feature until that happens.

Until that point, and until people here stop asking how to do it, I will continue to vote for integration as the number one feature. If it’s not going to happen, then stop saying it will on the front page of this website.

[chandersbs]

Guys,

I’m really happy there is a thread like this. I voted ‘integration with WordPress’ but honestly, there are a LOT OF THINGS I wished, were by default.

When I switched from SMF to bbPress, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. The reason I switched was, because SMF is using this license that you can’t change the code or something. And because of that, plugins were hard to find.

My users who visit my site, daily and already so many years, were totally used to the many features that SMF had/has. So the day I switched, they arrived at a forum who was completely empty.

Sure there are plugins, but not all plugins work (well) and sometimes you need spent hundreds of hours to get a plugin working. Not everyone has the time for it.

My forum doesn’t have a private message system, cause the plugins that are available, don’t work on it.

The forum doesn’t have a build-in feature for users to upload their own avatar. I had to achieve that via a plugin and hundreds of hours spending on this forum.

I don’t wanna sound like I’m complaining, I just want that it should be clear to some members that they should be a bit more open minded and not think that everything is fine and everyone can handle it. There are webmasters out there, that spent lots of time on bbPress forums and their own site to make it work like a normal forum.

[kevinjohngallagher]

“Please vote for features which aren’t available yet”

1. WYSIWYG-Editor

Availible for about 18 months now mate…

2. Facebook Connect.

Can i ask please mate, and with no disrespect, because alot of people are asking for this so there’s obviously a good reason that i’m just missing, in what way is it helpful to BBpress (which right now cant integrate properly with WordPress) to spend development time tyring for integration with someone else’s closed software? What are the advantages to the people who run forums of Facebook Connect?

Am i missing something since i hit 30?

We cant properly administer topics and posts, half the plugins we used to use dont work, and folks think Facebook Connect is the way forward? I’m not knocking it, i’m just loking for the reason. Thanks

*NB – to clarify, i’m not putitng anyones opinion down, I just dont see what the benfits of this system are. We’ve seen every internet company since ’90s (with the possible exception of google) go through Boom Bust scenarios and become obsolete. What the benfits of spending development time on this?

[Dailytalker]

I really can’t understand why most people voted for “integration with wordpress” and “anonymouse posting” because bbpress is already integrated in wordpress and it exists already a plugin for anonymouse posting. Please vote for features which aren’t available yet!

My favourites are:

1. WYSIWYG-Editor

2. Facebook-Connect

[chandersbs]

According to Google Webmaster tools, my site is slower than 77% of sites. Mostly it can be reduced by enabling gzip compression.

Does anyone here know how to make this work for bbPress?

I did some googling, and found this plugin for WordPress

http://ilfilosofo.com/blog/2008/02/22/wordpress-gzip-plugin/

[gerikg]

in WP go to /<home-folder>/wp-admin/options.php

check that everywhere you see the url has the www

Then go to your BBpress admin and click on Options check bbPress address (URL) see if the www is there.

try define( 'COOKIEPATH', '/<home folder>/wordpress/' ); first. Clear you cache after doing this. Then login and test it out.

if not.. then I ran out of ideas.

[johnhiler]

@timskii – Completely agree with you on the idea of standard plugins. WordPress is starting to move in a similar direction:

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

Also agree that forums are more dynamic and less suitable for caching than blogs, making bloat an especially important factor. This wasn’t as much of an issue through the 0.7-0.9 branches, but has starting to become more of an issue in 1.0 – especially with the BackPress integration.

[timskii]

Briefly on the bloat comments:

Forums are different from ‘blogs, and these differences need to be considered in the design:

• Users tend to interact more with forum pages – more page views, less use of remote feeds.
• Advertisers dislike forums – they’re much harder to fund using advertising.

So a “processor-intensive” forum can become a technical headache once you start seeing tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of users each day.

I’m in favour of features – BBPress clearly needs more to compete with mainstream expectations. The problem is specifically with features that are not optional – features that cannot be removed.

The logical approach is to include “standard” plugins in the distribution, which can be turned off as required. But that might still be problematic, if the most basic forum has to haul in the whole of WordPress before it does anything…

[Spindoctor]

Hi!

I also try to integrate Cookies, but I don’t succeed.

This might be due to the issue, that it’s not possible for me to follow every step of gerikgs instruction (by the way thank you for posting this instruction).

Here’s what I did:

my blog adress is http://www.<domain>/<home-folder>/

my wordpress adress is http://www.<domain>/<home-folder>/wordpress/

my bbpress adress is http://www.<domain>/<home-folder>/wordpress/bbpress/

(As I have no write-access on <domain> or <domain>/<home-folder>/, I had to keep the “www.”.)

Besides, I changed the table-prefixes of wordpress and bbpress to “<string>wp_” and “<string>bbpress_” when I installed wordpress and bbpress.

To integrate bbpress-cookies with wordpress, I changed the keys in wp-config.php and bb-config.php, just as described by gerikg.

Afterwards I changed Integration Settings in bbpress, so that WP-Admins are Keymasters in bbpress and every other role is member. (Again I had to keep the WWW in the URLs.) Sadly, the keys were not inactive…

Then I added “define( ‘COOKIEPATH’, ‘/<home folder>/’ );” (the plugin told me to add “define( ‘COOKIEPATH’, ‘/<home folder>/wordpress/’ );”, but when I did this I had problems with the cookies in wordpress itself, so I removed “wordpress/”)

Maybe that’s not surprising, but Cookie-Integration still doesn’t work.

I there a way to get Cookie-Integration working, with this setup?

Thank you for your help!!!

[Elias]

The one thing I love on bbPress

The one thing I love on bbPress is: It is simple and fast. “Simple” means, its functionality is easy to understand and to use for a less experienced internet user and there are no features distracting from the one core thing in a forum, from that funny discussion thing. And “Fast” means, that the bbPress core is even faster than the rather minimalist PunBB on the virtual server I use bbPress on. These are the two “features” of bbPress I really want to see in the future.

The things I hate on WordPress

Following the current discussion reminds me on my own experience with the great WordPress blog software. I am a WordPress user since WP 1.5.x, and WP 1.5.x was the software making me a blogger. It was easy to use, had a clean and simple user interface for the blogger, could be extended easily and replaces my simple home-written system after one week of testing and comparing to s9y.

Now, I do hate my long ago decision for WP sometimes. The current WP version 2.8.x is bloated, slow and without a good caching plugin not well-suited for a blog with readers.

As an example, there is a tiny german blog filled by me and less frequent some other people. It is called “Blah”, and most of its postings are simply links to other internet resources, mostly political, conspirational and funny ones. Did I mention that the blog is called “Blah”? It is not really a “successful” one, in the last six months there were approximately 2,000 visits per day, that’s not much. The “average visitor” requests five postings, and only one percent of them ever leaves a comment. The blog’s database contains 4,300 posts at the moment, that’s not much too. If I deactivate the WP Super Cache plugin, the server fails to handle that little load, the response time of the tiny blog grow to 30 to 50 seconds, the apache processes accumulates and finally the server runs out of virtual memory, giving visitors that funny “Out of memory” PHP error messages or a plain white page.

This is a situation totally unwanted for a bulletin board, which is a highly dynamic kind of website that can not be cached as easy as the less frequent views of a blog.

From bbPress 0.9.x to 1.0.x, the number of database queries to view the same page has nearly doubled, and the execution time has grown by approximately 60 percent on the same server. From the user point’s of view, it was exactly the same page, and bbPress is at the moment still performant enough to be better than any other bulletin board software. But from my point of view it remembers me to the things I experienced again and again with many new WordPress versions in the past, reaching the current point of a blog, which isn’t made to have more than a handful of readers. But for a WP blog, I can work around with WP Super Cache, for forums this approach is nearly impossible.

Some words about readers

I’m looking at the statistics generated from the apache logfiles of the Blah-blog for the last six months. It is a blog in german language, and of course most readers are living in Germany, less in Austria or Suisse, some in the Netherlands, Danmark, Belgium, Poland, Russia or Hungary too. These are not readers from the so called “third world”. (There is only one world, and we all have to share it!) In the last six months, 19 percent of the Blah-blog readers used an old dial-up modem connection to access it. (Identified by the rather speaking hostnames given in germany for that kind of connection I can identify, there may be some more readers with a low-bandwidth connection.) For this fifth part of my readers (which may be a representative value for other websites in germany too, but most people seems not interested in this kind of information), every use of large JavaScript magic which has to be loaded via a low-bandwidth connection gives an impression of slowness, and this is something I do not want to give them. That’s a reason for the rather minimalistic design of this blog.

Let me compare that 19 percent to another statistical number for the Blah-blog. 12 percent of all readers uses that fu… fine Internet Explorer 6.0 for surfing. (Identified by the user-agent string, which may be faked in rare cases.) The IE 6 is an old and ugly browser with many problems and a CSS box model interpretation giving a good headache to designers, and there are much better browsers out for free. But in many cases it is unwanted to exclude that 12 percent of website users or to give them a totally trashed design experience. It is also amazing, how many people are still using Windows 98 or ME or even Windows NT 4.0. I assume these people use rather old computers, still working for their personal requirements, so they don’t want to throw them to waste. Yes, there are people out there, which are poor and simply cannot spend a few hundred euros for new hardware every few years — me too. These are people I don’t want to exclude from any website I maintain, and especially I don’t want to exclude these from pages about political or cultural subjects. Every kind of bloat is wrong in my point of view.

(I use bbPress for a small forum on an uncommercial artists’ webpage, and it is great for that. This usage is my reason why I’m maintaining an inofficial german translation of bbPress, there is simply no language file for German at the moment, and not to share this work is stupid.)

Some words about the dashboard

The current bbPress dashboard is fine, it is aesthetical appealing, easy to use (compared to other bulletin boards’ backends) and fast even via a low-bandwidth connection and on a not up-to-date computer. It can be used with all browsers, and it makes all administrative tasks easy. The current WordPress dashboard sucks. It is unuseable slow with the Opera browser, and even with other browsers needs an enourmeous transfer of data and an long initialization time before one can do that simple thing which is blogging: writing a new post. If someone uses an older computer (older than five years), it is unuseable with any browser, and it is unbelievable frustrating to use via a dialup connection. And no, that “Google Gears” stuff does not help.) The huge amount of features are overwhelming for an unexperienced user, and for the little artists’ site (with eight authors) I still have to help some people for every post they want to blog. Since I had to upgrade that site to WP 2.8.x (it used 2.0.x and 2.3.x for a long time), the other authors hate me. Some of them are poor people. I recommend the usage of BlogDesk for them, but sometimes there are tasks which cannot be done with BlogDesk, as deleting an unwanted idiot’s comment or declaring a post as sticky (to announce an action, happening, exhibition, sound vernissage, reading, party, etc.). Since WP 2.8.x, the posting frequency of some co-authors is reduced to zero, and if I had the possibility for it, I would create my own WordPress fork (a DietPress for people who wants blogging without bloat).

And this is the way bbPress should avoid, in my opinion.

The bbPress of the future I want

bbPress is great! The bbPress core is good, and the features in an out-of-the-box installation are enough in many cases. But of course, there are things that could be improved, and there are many features often missed by people who wants a bulletin board. The probaly most wanted features are (list may be incomplete)

• eMail notification for new posts
• A kind of bbCode, which meets better the standard people expect in a BB software
• An improved editor, helping the user to do the wanted markup (may be bloaty magic WYSIWYG, but even eight buttons with a little JavaScript are better than nothing for the inexperienced user)
• An internal system of personal messaging (I hate it, but others love it)
• Attachment of files to a post
• Perhaps an avatar system independent from Gravatar
• An easy to extend user profile with additional informations
• A “who is online now” display
• Counters how often a post has been read
• A “terms of usage” statement which is required to be accepted by newly registered users
• An extended search with criteria as forum, tag, date range, username. (The existing search is better than the WordPress search, but I can still be improved. In a support forum with ten thousands of topics, it would be good to have the accumulated information more “findable”.)
• An interactive (and plugin-extensible and i18nable) help system for all core bbPress features, explaining the bbPress usage to inexperienced users and the concepts they cannot understand directly, especially tags. This is something I haven’t seen in any other BB software, but it is something really needed. It may even contain some words about netiquette…
• Perhaps a “widget system” similar to WP as a simple way to modify the order of appearance of the displayed entities without editing in themes

And of course, bbPress must remain performant, non-bloated and easy to integrate with WordPress. That’s a lot…

Many of these frequently requested features are not a good “standard” functionablity.

• The eMail notification is fine for spammers too. I am registered in some boards with this “feature”, and from time to time someone registers, writes spammy posts to various topics and the BB software dutifully and reliable sends that spam to a lot of users, before a moderator can do something. That’s why I am deactivating it always — one day, I received more than 100 mails “from my favorite forum”… aaargh!
• An over-improved editor slows down the forum for people with old hardware and makes the forum unusable for blind people with their strange solutions for surfing. (Yes, some of my “readers” are blind.)
• Personal massaging is a poor reinvention of good old internet eMail that sucks. For someone active on various boards, he has to check it messages in many places, which is ugly.
• An extended user profile is exactly the thing spammers want. The links in approximately 5 percent of my eMail spam are going to user profiles in bulletin boards, which are misused in many ways.
• Every upload possibility to the server can be a security problem, can be used by spammers to put spammy graphics in the internet or can consume execessive hard disc space on the server if heavily used.

But of course these features are wanted in many cases.

We should have a bbPress slogan for all future development. My suggestion is: Let’s make simple things easy, and let’s make complex things possible.

Learning from that part of WordPress which sucks means: Doing it better in bbPress. The core system should kept as a small one, perhaps a little smaller than the actual core. (The current user profile is sometimes unwanted.) And all additional features should be implemented in plugins, that a forum administrator can activate and configure as needed.

Core Plugins

But plugins are a huge problem too. Using a plugin indenpendent from the core system means: Making the update of bbPress to a new version sometimes to a migraine upgrade, whenever the needed plugins do not work with the newer version. Sometimes, I have this problem with one of my sites based on WordPress. And if the plugin’s functionality does require editing in the themes, it excludes less-experienced forum-administrators with a lack of PHP knowledge from using the plugins, which is not exactly the way to make complex things possible.

So there should be a set of plugins which are part of the bbPress release, which are developed together with the core system, let’s call them “core plugins”. It is not required to activate them to have a simple and basic bulletin board, but if someone do so, he will never have problems with upgrades. The “core plugins” are guaranteed to be delivered and to work with every release version and every security fix ever released. We have this kind of “core plugins” already, bozo users and Akismet. But it is a concept to be extended. A better post editor, a “terms of usage” page, a PM system, an internal avatar system, attachments to posts and all the administrative stuff around these features are good candidates for “core plugins”. If someone does not need them, he does not activated them. But if someone activates them and only them, this will never make the next bbPress release to a upgrade hell.

There may be bbPress-tags which are implemented empty if a core plugin isn’t activated, to make it easy to program the default theme and any other theme independent from the activated set of “core plugins” and without that sucking lines of if (function_exists ('bb_great_feature')) bb_great_feature ();. This kind of interface can be defined long before the “core plugins” are stable, and it can be documented for theme developers to allow them making their themes future-proof. (Oh yes, we need some good themes, the default one is fine, but some people want a richer selection.)

The bbPress features eighty percent of people want can be implemented in “core plugins”. Simple things will be easy. And if someone wants a small bbPress, that’s easier, he simply does not need to activate any “core plugin”. And there is still a plugin interface which makes complex things possible — sometimes a little editing in themes is required, but most people never needs to do so.

That’s the way bbPress should go, in my opinion.

(It may be a way for the future of WordPress too. But that’s not the topic here, and the WP developers do their work for a huge community of users and simply cannot change earlier decisions easily.)

And excuse my english. My poetic german is much better… and shorter.

[grassrootspa]

@ kevinjohngallagher:

One doesn’t need bbpress to display Voices, but it’s built into the core.

One doesn’t need bbpress to give every registered user a profile pic or gravatar, but it’s built into the core.

One doesn’t need bbpress to display Tags, but it’s built into the core.

One doesn’t need bbpress to allow users to ‘favorite’ posts, but it’s built into the core.

One doesn’t need bbpress to display a user’s recent activisty, but it’s built into the core.

One doesn’t need bbpress to display a user’s location, occupation, and interests, but it’s built into the core.

We could go on, and on, and on. One could make the argument that those features above (as well as others) could easily just be offered as plugins (no one REALLY needs to use them) but they are there to make the software more robust, fun, and useful! Think about each one and how things like Tags, favorites, gravatars, profile pics could simply be kept as plugins. Thank God those features were incorporated into the core.

Yes, bbPress could be the most barebone of all barebone bulletin board programs, with multiple plugins required to do anything more than throwing up a forum post, but for this software to become what WordPress is to blogging/CMS software it needs to offer a more robust list of core features that can be refined and further fleshed out with future plugins.

Again, I’m not saying you NEED to have TinyMCE turned on, use bbPress widgets, show how many times a topic has been viewed, display how many users are online, or use (new) default topic icons, but build this stuff into the core so folks can optionally use it, develop plugins to flesh those features out (imagine plugins/themes built around customizing various icon sets), and this stuff can grow with bbPress.

bbPress is like 1.93 MB is size. Plugins like mini-stats are 37.9 KB. You guys are killing me, like incorporating stuff like some of the more popular plugins is going to make bbPress too bulky and bloated to use? Someone isn’t going to go, OMG, bbPress is 2.20 MB in size, its just to bloated to download and install on my server and it offers too many optional features! Come on guys, this is getting silly. Let’s make bbPress more robust in features so it blows vBulletin out of the water.

[johnhiler]

Yes, 1.0 has a dramatically higher load.

I’m running 9 0.9.x bbPress installs along with a WordPress install on a single machine that’s doing around 10mm pageviews a month. If I was using the 1.0 branch, I don’t think I could come close to that.

[kevinjohngallagher]

@timskii

“Joanna Average forum reader doesn’t care about any of that, and is probably keener on things like WYSYWYG, email, etc.”

This is a really excellent point, but you have to realise that “Joanna Average” doesn’t hang around on these forums, and so any suggestions of what the ‘average’ user wants – especially in terms of interactive functionality – is generally the poster projecting their own wishes.

There is also this great myth that the ‘average user’ is a tech savvy person, running JavaScript on a fast machine, who greatly enjoys a every feature out there. If you look at the trend of the internet over the past 15 years, almost all types of interactivity on the client-side or ‘feature requests’ become popular and then get phased to a small percentage real quickly.

@grassrootspa

“…private messaging, TinyMCE/rich text, topic views, Allow Images, Smilies, User Directory, Members Online, Related Topics, Reputation, Top Posters…”

The issue i have here mate, is that very few of these are essential to the running of a forum.

I use, and one or two other do two, something called E-mail as a private messaging system. My website, bless it – almost 14 years old now – has something called a Contact Form. I’m not sure that forums absolutely *need* another way of contacting people to function.

I don’t want to debunk your list, but given what you and timskii have said that we should redefine the categories we’re placing things into:

1) Features that are essential to administer a forum.

2) Features that are essential for users to use a forum.

3) Features that you’d like to see available to your forum.

4) Features that could be kind of cool.

5) Features that are useless.

BBpress development should, in my opinion, focus on Section 1 and then Section 2. Once we have a working stable and maintained version of BBpress, plugin developers will start to work on Sections 3 and 4. We know this because that’s how WordPress works, and its how BBpress was working about a year-18 months ago with version 0.9.

My issue is, while everyone’s opinion would vary, i don’t see many of the features you think should be included as standard being in Section 1 or 2. I understand that they may be features you want in t a forum as standard, or features that you think your users want as standard – and that’s totally cool – but lets focus on the features that both we (admins) and the users need as a minimum to use our forums effectively.

Just my two cents.