[RandomGuySays]

I understand what you’re saying. But like I said, these are basic forum elements that are missing – for instance, if you have more than 10 topics, by default your forum is now 2 pages long as opposed to giving the option to choose what’s visible so you can prevent this problem from happening the way other bulletin boards do – without having to edit code. Polls and the like are also standard forum material that are absent with bbPress. As I’ve said before, I understand the premise of the bbPress software – less code is more. And to a degree, I agree with that, where the ability to customize the software’s appearance to suit almost anything is a huge reason why I considered it. But as Kawauso said, even if the bbPress team made their own optional plugins supporting these basic features (again e.g. polls), at least we wouldn’t have to worry about them losing support.

And rjeevan, you’re right, there’s always a risk. Say I install bbPress and one day they stop development. I already have the risk of whether or not a plugin providing a basic accustomed feature will just get discontinued one day, now I have to worry about losing the entire forums too. You’re argueing that there’s always risk, but missing the fact that with software like bbPress (and to a lesser extent, phpbb) there’s more risk. Things like this are in my opinion what’s holding open source software back, when Kawauso provided a simple solution that could in turn please everyone (provided the plugins are developed and maintained by their respectable counterparts).

Ben – For the record, you not reading the EULA on any forum you joined is exactly why an EULA is needed.

[RandomGuySays]

I understand what you’re saying. But like I said, these are basic forum elements that are missing – for instance, if you have more than 10 topics, by default your forum is now 2 pages long as opposed to giving the option to choose what’s visible so you can prevent this problem from happening the way other bulletin boards do – without having to edit code. Polls and the like are also standard forum material that are absent with bbPress. As I’ve said before, I understand the premise of the bbPress software – less code is more. And to a degree, I agree with that, where the ability to customize the software’s appearance to suit almost anything is a huge reason why I considered it. But as Kawauso said, even if the bbPress team made their own optional plugins supporting these basic features (again e.g. polls), at least we wouldn’t have to worry about them losing support.

And rjeevan, you’re right, there’s always a risk. Say I install bbPress and one day they stop development. I already have the risk of whether or not a plugin providing a basic accustomed feature will just get discontinued one day, now I have to worry about losing the entire forums too. You’re argueing that there’s always risk, but missing the fact that with software like bbPress (and to a lesser extent, phpbb) there’s more risk. Things like this are in my opinion what’s holding open source software back, when Kawauso provided a simple solution that could in turn please everyone (provided the plugins are developed and maintained by their respectable counterparts).

Ben – For the record, you not reading the EULA on any forum you joined is exactly why an EULA is needed.

[Ben Sutcliffe]

Heys,

I have to disagree. bbPress is the exact alternative to other forum software, and that’s why it’s great. It’s lightweight and really easy to fiddle about with. You do need to know PHP and an understanding of how other Automattic products work comes in handy, but the end result is that bbPress is a great base for dynamic forums.

I’ve used it to create forums that don’t really look like they ever were bbPress, and I think that’s the beauty of the software. There’s very little point in Automattic creating another phpBB – the market is already flooded, and services like vBulletin already “do that”.

bbPress doesn’t do a lot of things by default: it’s behind WordPress on things like threaded replies and the like, but it’s damn easy to create that kind of thing, without excessive code. If you want it all done for you, use something else; bbPress gives you the platform to take code and build on top. Add threaded replies if you so wish, require users to sign up using Twitter or FB Connect if you want to keep the robots out, and create templates and designs that are truly yours. You don’t have to use whatever pre-defined nonsense is held within phpBB.

If you want to get rid of links, you can comment them out or delete the link altogether in the template. The simplicity and lightweight nature of bbPress make it truly flexible. With plugins bbPress can do anything. I’ve never had to deal with a single element of spam on any forum I host, and I have a lot of posts on one of them. Akismet keeps spam down, like it does on WordPress, and ReCAPTCHA is a beautiful and highly functional tool for keeping robots out. It’s a little like WordPress: if you want a ready made blog you use Blogger or Tumblr, if you want to take more control, WordPress allows you to (simply) control anything.

Finally, why do you need a EULA? KISS – a terms of use page linked to from your footer works just as well. I’m not sure I ever actually read the EULA on any forum I joined.

Ben

[Ben Sutcliffe]

Heys,

I have to disagree. bbPress is the exact alternative to other forum software, and that’s why it’s great. It’s lightweight and really easy to fiddle about with. You do need to know PHP and an understanding of how other Automattic products work comes in handy, but the end result is that bbPress is a great base for dynamic forums.

I’ve used it to create forums that don’t really look like they ever were bbPress, and I think that’s the beauty of the software. There’s very little point in Automattic creating another phpBB – the market is already flooded, and services like vBulletin already “do that”.

bbPress doesn’t do a lot of things by default: it’s behind WordPress on things like threaded replies and the like, but it’s damn easy to create that kind of thing, without excessive code. If you want it all done for you, use something else; bbPress gives you the platform to take code and build on top. Add threaded replies if you so wish, require users to sign up using Twitter or FB Connect if you want to keep the robots out, and create templates and designs that are truly yours. You don’t have to use whatever pre-defined nonsense is held within phpBB.

If you want to get rid of links, you can comment them out or delete the link altogether in the template. The simplicity and lightweight nature of bbPress make it truly flexible. With plugins bbPress can do anything. I’ve never had to deal with a single element of spam on any forum I host, and I have a lot of posts on one of them. Akismet keeps spam down, like it does on WordPress, and ReCAPTCHA is a beautiful and highly functional tool for keeping robots out. It’s a little like WordPress: if you want a ready made blog you use Blogger or Tumblr, if you want to take more control, WordPress allows you to (simply) control anything.

Finally, why do you need a EULA? KISS – a terms of use page linked to from your footer works just as well. I’m not sure I ever actually read the EULA on any forum I joined.

Ben

[RandomGuySays]

Don’t get me wrong, I want to. bbPress looks wonderful, I love the simplicity and ease of use, as well as it’s integration features which are a huge plus to me. And while I acknowledge that bbPress is going through some tough times (being semi-new and through my understanding, the project lead leaving), I cannot choose bbPress for my site. The worst part about my specific situation is that I’ll most likely end up using it in the future once it’s matured, and knowing that is even more of a kick in the pants.

A lot of times with software, the more simple it is to use, the less features it has to be used. However, bbPress lacks basic bulletin board features – like poll creation, simple appearance settings such as customizing visible forum structures, and even a pre-made registration EULA. Other bulletin boards include prepared terms and conditions to protect your site, bbPress simply asks for your e-mail which with the lack of spam prevention filters like Captchas, even with the right plugin becomes an open door towards floods of spam. Other bulletin boards also give you the ability to, for instance, change the number of how many subforums are visible: Say you have a video game forum, organized as follows: Games (Category), Console/PC (Forums), Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo (Subforums), Xbox/Xbox 360 (Sub-subforums), Hardware/Accessories (etc.). On most forum software, the appearance settings default to showing one set of subforums per-page – e.g. when you click, ‘Console Games’, the next page displays only, ‘Microsoft/Sony/ Nintendo’, and you go from there. bbPress however, defaults to listing them all at once, resulting in enormously long forum pages that can only be changed by editing code. This may not be a problem for a lot of people as it should only require changing one or two lines to fix, but as a basic feature found in most other bulletin boards, to expect people to know how bbPress’ code works would just be wrong, and as such becomes a huge turn off.

In my opinion, one of the biggest bottlenecks and double-edged swords of open source software such as WordPress, bbPress, and even other open source forums, are the plugins. I remember reading a blog discussing the state of bbPress where the poster used the phrase, ‘there’s a plugin for that’. Plugins can be great, but they should also be considered an added bonus and not relied on for basic features. Most plugins are created by a third party, or even people like us. Just for talk sake, lets use wp-united for example. Wp-united is a plugin that links accounts between WordPress and phpbb so people can use their account from one, with the other. Say I used WordPress with phpbb, and then used wp-united to link the two. One day the wp-united team ceases support, and their latest version is incompatible with the new phpbb/WordPress. Now what happens to the huge install base I’ve developed? Do new users now have to register twice? Is my database going to be completely screwed up? bbPress eliminates this problem by having seemless integration with WordPress, but it just shows an example of how plugins can be both a good and bad thing, and how some features (like poll creation) need to be made a part of the main software despite, ‘less code being more’.

And lastly, arguably the number one issue preventing me from using bbPress, is the state of bbPress itself; the development of this software is up in the air with there being two completely different places to discuss it’s progress (this being one of them), and the other claiming talks of turning bbPress into a BuddyPress plugin. So the people new to bbPress, such as myself, don’t know what to do. Should we install the software now? Or wait until it’s a plugin? If we install now and they change it to a plugin, what happens to the standalone installations? Do they get screwed? Are they forced to install BuddyPress and switch everything over? Now I’m only human. I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong, I make mistakes. But even if not all my facts are straight, the fact that doing the research lead to this whole scenario makes for quite the first impression.

I didn’t post this to bash bbPress, I just hoped it would clear some of the confusion and thought it might in some way shape or form help bbPress and it’s users by getting these issues out in the open.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I think you’ve hit a key point christofius:

Some of the proposed plugins should be integrated in the core. Report user, user roles, quotes, SEO, stickies, improved moderation, Pivate Messages: all of that I consider essential to a good forum script

Many would agree, many wouldn’t.

Thats one of the goals, to ensure that you only had what was essential to run a forum.

I’ve been lucky enough to be on the internet for almost 20 years (and on “forums” since the bulletin-board/guestbook era), and i’ve never once used “private messaging”. That is, unless [you] call E-mail private messaging.

…while there is nothing wrong with making them into a plugin, it would be much more convenient for new users not to have to install a bunch of stuff to get those features.

The same could be said for people uninstalling them.

My viewpoint is this, and I may be totally wrong, but if you include ‘core plugins’ turned off by default, users get a light-weight active and working forum right out of the box, and all they have to click is “activate” to get the desire feature working.

This is how WordPress does it just now with the likes of Akismet, and there are very few complaints that I know of.

[egonen]

It took me sometime to find, But I found the problem:

my-themes should have 755 permissions (not the default of 750).

I found it in this forum.

Still want to change to a real pic in this forum.

Eyal

[_ck_]

Wait, are you talking about on TOPIC pages or on forum/front page.

The default order in bbPress is newest topics show up at the top on forum/front page, but newest posts show up last on topic page.

Because you said “posts” I assumed you meant topic page.

Or are you saying you want to link the “last poster” to the last post in a topic? That’s already done on freshness?

[christofius]

Before I respond, can I give you some comments about your draft.

1. Some of the proposed plugins should be integrated in the core. Report user, user roles, quotes, SEO, stickies, improved moderation, Pivate Messages: all of that I consider essential to a good forum script and while there is nothing wrong with making them into a plugin, it would be much more convenient for new users not to have to install a bunch of stuff to get those features.
2. I agree that bbpress has been neglected over the past years, and that the website especially needs a revamp.
3. I also think that the fork needs a better theming structure, one that is easier to use and allows people with little/no knowledge to be able to edit the theme.
4. I also think that this new software should include some features that have not been included in a lot of forum softwares, but are still useful, if not esential.

1. Moderation Log: the idea behind it is that whenever a post gets deleted, who deleted it, a copy of the deleted post, and some notes on why it got deleted are recorded in a log (that is only viewable to certain people, of course). That way administrators and moderators can easily keep track of troublemakers and they have a log of all past offenses.
2. Good page structure: most people spend a minuet or two looking at a site before deciding to join it. One of the factors that influence the decision is activity. The new forum software structure should be designed to reflect the activity of the forum, and how much fun people are having. This is mostly in the themes, so that’s why the default theme should be designed to reflect that.

But anyway, now I have 3 questions:

1. have you ever been on the development side of an open source project?
2. If this fork got underway, would you be running the show, and if you did, how much would you contribute to the project programing wise?
3. How would ideas get approved?

thank you for your time

[_ck_]

They did something wrong and bbpress defaults to “anonymous” when it can’t find the user. Probably means they didn’t do a global or something like that.

[Bryan Petty]

I have a WP install that doesn’t use any table prefix (the default being “wp_”) in the installer, and I had trouble getting bbPress installed using it.

I did get bbPress installed using the “wp_” prefix anyway, but had to go into the database by hand and change the bb_metadata entry for the prefix to nothing, and merge the (apparently auto-created) wp_metadata table into my “metadata” table to get it to work.

I can’t see any problems past what I ran into with the installation, it all works fine now, but I thought I would report this anyway.

[Rose]

Does anyone know if this still works with the current incarnations of wordpress and bbpress? I’ve tried it but it comes up with nada (using the default bbpress template with <?php echo bb_list_pages();?> added).

[wblogan]

Checked out r2540 from http://svn.automattic.com/backpress/trunk and I’m still getting the problem that was fixed in r2518.

[wblogan]

Well, you’ve introduced me to subversion. I had no idea. I don’t know whether to thank or cuss you! I’ve downloaded svn packages (I run the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on my computers) and am working through documentation. I’ll get it sooner or later. Thanks!

[mr_pelle]

It’s a bit hard to explain…

I suppose you may try to download bbPress trunk and then BackPress trunk from here and extract the /includes folder into /bb-includes/backpress folder…

EDIT: you’ll need this too.

[wblogan]

Man, I hate to be so ignorant, but I did not know what SVN is. So I went to Docs and did not find anything helpful, then to google and found http://svn.automattic.com/bbpress/trunk/. I do not find a zip archive there so I take it that one simply chooses the file(s) one wants and does a copy/paste?

[mr_pelle]

Note that the archive you can find on TRAC does not include BackPress: I suggest you to upgrade via SVN.

[wblogan]

I downloaded from https://bbpress.org/download/, not from https://trac.bbpress.org/browser/trunk. I did not know about “trunk”. If the link at the bottom of the page to zip format is what I need then I’ve got it. Thanks. I’ll give it a try.

[mr_pelle]

Did you download the archive from here or from the Download page on this site? The former is trunk, the latter 1.0.2…

[lmsook10]

Thanks for your reply. Yes, if I select year/month/title option, it goes to http://localhost/wordpress/forums/ (which is bbpress) page, which I wanted.

However, I have another page, like about and staff.. and they do not exist like forum, so I need them to be like default?p=123

Currently, if I click about page, it tries to go to http://localhost/wordpress/about/ and it throws Object not found! error because I do not have about page. How can I solve this problem?

Thanks,

[wblogan]

@chrishajer – you got me to thinking, so this morning I downloaded both the zip and tar files from this site replaced all of my core files with each of these (just to insure that there was no difference between the zip and tar); same problem. I’m no developer; I figured this was some problem on my end and not with the core files. It doesn’t seem to have affected the function, just the appearance, so it is not a huge deal. Should I report this as a bug or what? (And if so can you tell me where to do that?)

[wblogan]

I am using the default WordPress and Kakumei themes at the moment. It seemed that bbPress was very sluggish, so I activated the default theme in order to check the load on the server and found that it was significantly less with the default theme than with the integrated theme. In my case it’s a personal call in favor of performance. This is a well known trade off about which there is plenty of information available.

Having an integrated and non-integrated theme created no issues of which I am aware. Unless I am forgetting something the only change to the WordPress theme was the call to the bbPress style sheet in header.php. All other changes are made to the bbPress theme. So either remove, comment out, or leave the call – I don’t think it hurts performance. I commented it out so that I can do some testing. I may be wrong about something here, but it’s all working for me at the moment.

[wblogan]

Version 1.0.2.

[chrishajer]

What version of bbPress are you using? The bracket problem was fixed a while ago, and right now in the default theme it all appears on one line, not multiples.

http://chrishajer.com/bbpress/single-line-move.png

The link colors are changed but this is otherwise Kakumei default, running r2518 trunk.

[wblogan]

I found a work around which I’m not totally satisfied with. I created a style for the admin class called in the div but which did not exist in the style sheet, and removed the brackets around the move drop down from the function call. There are still two lines, but it’s all on one.