[Raize]

It’s definitely going to be a trade-off to go from a standalone software to a wordpress plugin, but I don’t think there’s very much choice. There are already so many standalone forums out there for non wp users, so it just makes sense to go this route. Connect blog comments to forum threads, and you got yourself the next evolution of the blogging community.

[chrishajer]

file naming convention:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress#Repository_File_Structure

[paulhawke]

My experience of the WordPress codebase extends to version 2.9.1, I cannot speak to what is going on with version 3.0. Matt said something about bbPress being hosted on a page using a WP short-code at one point. As far as I know, there is no facility for page slugs to handle wildcards (from what I have seen). If you wanted to host bbPress as a plugin using a short-code on a WordPress page, it’s my guess that you would need to have different short-codes for the front page, topics page, views page, single topic, etc. Either that, or you recode the entire bbPress GUI to be Ajax based and run on a single page in-place. Somehow you need to extend the WordPress roles to encompass the bbPress side of the house.

When you go down this road you eventually get to the point of Drupal – amazingly vague and configurable database, slow because it’s got to be all-things-to-all-people and … well … yeah. I would rather not see either WordPress or bbPress end up there.

It it’s favour we can strip out a large portion of the codebase that deals with preferences, users, filters, plugins, themes, sidebar widgets and so on. We gain a lot from the main WordPress codebase but its worrying the “bloat” that comes with that approach.

[chrishajer]

Liz, I deleted your post here since you have another in the other thread which I replied to. Tony has long left the building.

[kadr]

As a newbie to BBpress I have only one thing to say: I sure hope this project get’s some devoted people behind it! I really like the software and would love to see it become just as populair as wordpress is!

[arashagha2]

hi

thanks to FarsiPress.ir ( a brand new support for wordpress in Persian )

i hereby announce the release of bbpress in persian

plz visit : http://www.farsipress.ir/download

[Gautam]

@Olaf

That would pile up even more work. I would probably go forward and extract the code in bp-forums of BuddyPress and make a WordPress plugin to integrate bbPress forums.

[Olaf Lederer]

There is so much work to create a full featured forum from bbpress and maybe it’s better to make it a WP plugin…

[bobtheman]

thanks for your reply kevin, the reasons of why bbpress should be a plugin was briefly discussed above in the topic, having bbpress contingent on wordpress belittles bbpress and strangles its ability to develope as an open source project.

1. As already addressed, the majority of people talking about integration, plugin, wordrpess .. if we took a long hard look arnt talking about it because they want bbpress to be a plugin, they just want some form of integration and use those terms interchangeably… very lossly might i add.

2. We are still an opensource project and the community matters. its up to the PM’s to get the community as a whole involved with submitting tickets, testing beta versions and getting interests in programing “recruiting”

3. its obvious people dont like the bbpress as a plugin idea, and when the team no matter who it is decides in disregard of the community it will show in the contributions.. case and point. The bbpress project doesn’t technically need funding from automattic “it would be nice though” .. because an opensource project like this should be able to develop a business plan and project plan and flourish as all other opensource projects do.

4. You’ve addressed why in your opinion we can change anything and our “votes” dont count. Congratulations… but you forgot to give your opinion and viewpoint on the topic at question.

oh yeah… there are programmers that can contribute to the project hiding amongst us

[kevinjohngallagher]

Another voting thread, awesome, these are always productive and rarely descend into sycophantic rants or love ins.

That said, ChrisHajer should definitely NOT be the next project lead of BBpress. Chris is a great great moderator, and to remove him from this role would leave us with ZERO moderators.

Gautam and Nightgunner5 are both programmers, skilled to be sure, but that does not make a good project lead either.

Mentions of _ck_ are like mentions of Elvis working in a 7/11. You hear it every now and then from people who don’t want to accept that it’s in the past.

No, whoever leads BBpress will be from Automattic. It’s their project folks, they’re just letting us chat on their forums. At the end of the day, people will vote for people they agree with, and not in an objective manner, heck i’m confident that if I was to say that i think BBpress should not be a WP plugin and should have facebook connect then i could convince a least 2 people to vote for me, regardless of any actual facts.

oh look:

My meaningless vote goes to whoever dislikes bbPress becoming a WordPress plugin the most

These type of threads are so awesome!! and so helpful!!

[johnhiler]

It’s not so hard to integrate WordPress with bbPress 0.9. Although I do think you’re right that it’s easier to integrate WordPress and bbPress if you’re using the latest versions of both.

[kevinjohngallagher]

An extremely, over exaggerated word that has been used to change the developmental focus of bbpress is Integration.

You’ve totally got this wrong bobtheman mate.

WordPress Integration is the most used phrase on this board, and the most used tag. It’s also a feature, listed in the features page. It’s also why alot of people came to this project. If it’s not something you want, cool, but it is something the majority want.

1. Single Signon

2. Single Theme

3. Admin panel they recognise

This is mostly what people want. We know this thanks to metrics, tags, being here for 2 years, and at least 50% of support requests fall into this category. At the end of the day it comes down to this:

If you don’t care about WordPress Integration use BBpress 0.9.

It’s awesome, fast, easy to theme, and miles better than the hatched testing ground for BackPress that 1.0.2 is.

If you do care about WordPress integration use BBpress 1.0.2

It’s ridiculously convoluted to set up, with more pitfalls than an Indiana Jones movie, but once working it’s ok.

If you don’t want BBpress to become a WordPress plugin, buy out Automattic. Or, and this is the biggie, give [the project owner] good objective reasons as to why it would be beneficial for them in the long run. Otherwise, you’re as well adding “Waaaaahhhhhhhhhh >.<” to the end of every sentence. Because that is what it sounds like to [the project owner].

To end this chapter of confusion and to get bbpress back on trac, on February 14 I propose a IRC meeting which will follow with a blog post of the results with a roadmap for the future

I know we’re all geeks, but cant we pretend like Feb14th might actually see us doing something else? I’m confident i’ll lose what’s left of my genitalia if I tell my partner that i’m not taking her to Paris so we can do an IRC chat.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m a big fan of people speaking their mind, I probably do it too often, but if we’re being honest, threads like these aren’t going to change anything. Even if you got 90% of the people that are on these boards to all come out and say that they agree with you, nothing will change.

Can we talk openly about this? It means sharing some hard truths…

1) There are roughly (roughly), 25 -30 different people that post on these forums every week. I’m sure you’ve noticed its the same folks for the most part over and over. Each of these people (you and I) represent a tiny tiny portion of the BBpress users. Its not that your opinions aren’t valued, it’s just that unless you come up with objective reasons behind your arguments then you’ll never see any changes you want.

2) You’re not programmers. Harsh, i know. But you’re on a support forum saying that you’re unhappy about proposed changes to free software that you don’t contribute to.

3) When did private companies start listening to people taking “votes” on their support forums. Oh, that’s right, never.

4) I’m going to make an assumption here (apologies if wrong), but you’re not project managers or BA’s either. Making BBpress a WordPress plugin (while not something i am happy with at all), makes sense from [the company that owns bbpress] stand point.

5) Matt, et all, are human and just trying to do their best. If you think they’ve overlooked a point then tell them. But it has to be a point that will make sense to a company like [the one that owns bbpress], and that rarely involves the phrase “i want” or “my vote”.

Look folks,

BBpress as a WordPress plugin is not going to come around any time soon. In honesty, it’s not going to be this year. if you don’t want a forum software that is focussed on integration with WordPress that’s cool, that’s a personal preference, but have a look on the tag list on the home page, and see what stands out.

WordPress integration is the single most talked about issue on the BBpress support forums because it’s the reason that a large percentage of people came to BBpress for.

We all have a different Wish List of features for this lovely piece of software, but that doesn’t mean that if BBpress doesn’t go our own personal way that it it’s “bbpress back on track”. if we’re honest, BBpress hasn’t been “on track” by it’s own standards for well over a year, but if you’re not contributing code or testing time, then frankly, your opinion is never really going to count for anything unless you back your points up with really really good objective reasons.

[Gautam]

@johnhiler

I think you misunderstood me. I am saying to only extract bp-forums part of BuddyPress and make a new WordPress plugin out of it which would integrate bbPress into WordPress.

By the way, the trunk version of BuddyPress can be installed on a normal WordPress install.

[johnhiler]

BuddyPress only offers one option: it’s a WordPress MU plugin, and can’t be installed as a standalone.

I think it’d be pretty tough to offer bbPress as both a plugin and a standalone… it sounds like the choice has been made to turn it into a plugin.

The only real way to keep it standalone would be if someone forked bbPress 0.9 or 1.0… that’s a lot of work though.

[Gautam]

I think it is just a modified version of BBcode Lite plugin by _ck_.

[OKTeaRoom]

I just made a post over at http://wordpress.org/support and I really like the formatting code buttons they are using for their forum.

Firebug has some code that eludes to ed_toolbar

Is this available in a plugin that I can use? Thanks.

[Gautam]

There was some discussion about making bbPress a WordPress plugin. This would lead to a complete re-write of the project, but I have a better idea:

1. bbPress should be a standalone platform, so it can also be run without WordPress.
2. There should be a plugin on WordPress plugins repo (for eg. bbPress Forums Integrator or simply bbPress), which would have bbPress as svn:external and load the bbPress files as BuddyPress does it. Basically the plugin could be what can be found here – http://trac.buddypress.org/browser/trunk/bp-forums
3. This way both type of users would be benefitted – those who want bbPress as a standalone and those who want it to be deeply integrated with WordPress.

Some of my thoughts…

Gautam

[grassrootspa]

@Gautam:

Nightgunner5 (Ben) would also be an excellent person to lead bbPress.

There certainly are quite a few talented folks who could potentially take some sort of evil dictator role.

haha, you are both new _ck_ s!

My meaningless vote goes to whoever dislikes bbPress becoming a WordPress plugin the most! They get a second vote if they want to add more features to the core (I vote early and often!)

[Gautam]

Thanks for the appreciation, grassrootspa!

Though I feel Ben is the new _ck_ (except for the fact that he is male.. lol )

[HeroicNate]

[EDIT chrishajer] I am a frequent user/theme builder for wordpress and more and more clients of mine want what chris is describing. I personally would find it to be a great help to have all of those 3 things. “From the creators of wordpress” is actually what turned me onto bbpress as well. I wanted a forum that would work hand in hand with wordpress. I wish I had more coding knowledge to be able to really contribute to the discussion. [EDIT -chrishajer] I’d say that people like me don’t necessarily need bbpress to be a plugin, but would like it to work with wordpress as if they were made for each other, so-to-speak.

[chrishajer]

I don’t think bbPress will be a WordPress plugin any time soon. 1.1 was to have a couple new features (subscribe to topic by email, anonymous posting) and the rest bug fixes. After that, and I think after WordPress 3.0 (with the merge of WPMU and also fleshed out custom post types) there would be some more thought, if not effort, put into bbPress as a WordPress plugin.

[chrishajer]

I know you’re being facetious, but I think that’s what a lot of users want. A forum that plays nice with WordPress, and by plays nice I mean single sign-on and it looks like WordPress. If bbPress were a plugin for WordPress, just as there are other WordPress forum plugins, you wouldn’t need to worry about the theming since the plugin would be inside WordPress. You wouldn’t need to worry about things like wp_list_pages() since you’d still be inside WordPress. And presumably, there wouldn’t be login issues since there would just be one login, WordPress.

I say presumably since I’ve never built a blog with WordPress and thus never had user registrations to worry about needing to be logged in already to bbPress.

I know I came to bbPress from WordPress (something like “forum software from the makers of WordPress” was the hook.) I never needed integration or look alike theme or even WordPress functions. So, for me, having bbPress standalone is fine since that’s how I use it. However, many people, I’d say half the support requests here, want:

1. forum to look like WordPress theme

2. log in once for both forum and WordPress

3. be able to use WordPress functions in bbPress (mostly theming, I think, but there are other requests as well.)

[bobtheman]

take the bbpress forums, throw the WP header, footer, theme, functions on it… why dont we just apply to have bbpress included in WP core and forget this ever existed.

Maybe a conversion tool to convert Wp themes to use on bbpress, all processed on the backend of course.

also, should bbpress look like wordpress? Is that what our project is striving for?

[chrishajer]

Integration to a lot of people also means “I want the forums to look like the WordPress site”. That was referred to by some as “deep integration” where you include WordPress in the bb-config.php and then have access to WordPress functions like get_header(), get_footer(), wp_list_pages(), etc.