[Matias Ventura]

I just wanted to share the experience I have gathered while working, designing and pushing bbPress so as to not look like a generic bbPress instance. My latest work are these forums (the rest of the site is WordPress), and if you have the time please consider registering to be able to play a bit with the design from a member-perspective (enjoyed better in Safari). I would appreciate your feedback.

I am really captivated by the possibilities bbPress offers; but I also feel the obscurity of these possibilities are somehow hindering proper development in the design department. The lack of a proper and exhaustive codex, readable for theme authors —without having to dig into core files—, remains as the biggest obstacle. I am all for contributing, should it be possible, in this way or another.

[inkey]

I’ve installed bbPress 1.0.6. alpha and integrate it with WordPress 2.7.1. Everything is fine.

But there is one big problem:

When user with IE is registered, he can use forum for 2 or 3 days, after that he cannot open no one topic. After User is log in and click on topic link page loads and there is error pop-up, that says (translated to English):

Can not load page –there is url to topic page–

Operation aborted

With “OK” button.

After clicking “OK” there is IE page, that says “Internet Explorer can not view this page”.

In Firefox, Chrome, K-Meleon and Opera everything is fine.

You can test it on: http://oakdaily.ru/forum

Sorry for my English.

[krischan68]

Same here. I’m stuck with WP 2.5.1 at the moment because of the single login I need for WP and BB.

I will definitely try superann’s plugin – thanks a lot for that.

As a rather nontechnical user, I would like to know if you expect the plugin to break with minor 2.7 updates. Maybe it’s a stupid question, but I can’t evaluate that myself.

[krischan68]

Same here. I’m stuck with WP 2.5.1 at the moment because of the single login I need for WP and BB.

I will definitely try superann’s plugin – thanks a lot for that.

As a rather nontechnical user, I would like to know if you expect the plugin to break with minor 2.7 updates. Maybe it’s a stupid question, but I can’t evaluate that myself.

[superann]

Thanks johnmc! I worked hard on the site; haven’t spent nearly as much time with bbPress as I have with WP so I kind of did the absolute minimum to start and was lazy about the cookie integration that didn’t work out of the box… until someone else on my forums complained…

WP and bbPress are running side by side off the same user database, same process to set up as described in the integration thread here. No deep integration, just customized the templates to match. Registrations are routed to WP via a direct link to it in the login-form.php template, which is cool as I use the Register Plus plugin there to customize things a bit. Logins (and outs) are integrated via cookies using the plugin which you can grab here:

http://superann.com/2009/02/26/wordpress-26-27-bbpress-09-cookie-integration-plugin/

Also, thanks for the welcome, ck! I do more theme customizations for WP but usually do it all the quick and dirty way, cramming things into function.php file rather than packaging it up nicely, and I often just hack features into other plugins to get it all working the way I want. Right now as far as bbPress is concerned on my to-do list is to find a good solution for manually marking spam posts, work email notification into the pm plugin, and set up the post notification to send email by default. Just haven’t had time to look into all that yet… if there are any existing solutions/patches, please let me know! Otherwise I’ll probably look into it at some point and contribute what I can (if anyone else is interested).

[_ck_]

Your plugin will have a far longer useful life than you’d might think.

I’d estimate at least six months. I wish I thought of it six months ago.

But at least people have two ways to avoid 1.0 alpha 7 which will break my plugins.

[superann]

Yep, cleared all my cookies and it appears that things work as they should. I haven’t pored over the source too considerably but from what I saw it looks like there are very few dependencies, which makes sense as I’m guessing WP wants you to be able to integrate sign on systems without jumping through hoops.

My sites aren’t “deeply” integrated, so it would be great to get some feedback from anyone who tries this on a deep integration.

Plugin here:

http://superann.com/2009/02/26/wordpress-26-27-bbpress-09-cookie-integration-plugin/

In retrospect I shouldn’t have put this at v1.0, but I expect its useful life might be short anyway once bbPress 1.0 is released…

[_ck_]

It’s strange that I didn’t think to downgrade WP 2.7 to match bbPress 0.9 but I guess I overthought the process and figured the new “auth” cookie method would be required in the admin area on WP so it would break. I assume you have tested your admin access in WordPress after your changes?

WordPress 2.7 added three new kinds of cookies, surprised it doesn’t break anything when you force it backwards. Did you delete all of your old cookies on your browser to make sure it wasn’t “cheating” ?

In any case, my new plugin is here and should be downloadable for testing shortly:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/freshly-baked-cookies/

One plus to the WP downgrade method is it might work with deep integration where mine will definitely not work and should not even be tried that way.

[superann]

Hey _ck_… that’s great news! It’s probably better to do it your way but I did it this way as I was lazy… I didn’t have to write a single line of code and it was literally just copy and paste from WP 2.5 pluggable functions. And yep, I did override the salt with the old function too.

[_ck_]

On a funny coincidence, I just finished a plugin to make 0.9 work with 2.7 cookies.

But are you saying you downgraded WP 2.7’s cookies into 2.5 cookies to make it work with bbPress by replacing the functions from the WP 2.5 pluggable?

Mine is the opposite approach, it let’s WP 2.7 keep it’s cookies and bbPress uses the logged_in cookie from WP.

I guess either technique is valid. You must have forced the salt to be the same on both sides though.

[superann]

Yep, same method above works with WP 2.7.1 and bbPress 0.9.0.4. Just tested and there’s full cookie integration.

[John James Jacoby]

I still don’t understand WHY people want to run more than WP 2.5 considering how insanely bloated it’s become and I find the new menu system annoying.

So what you’re saying is that the world shouldn’t do what you don’t think is right.

[superann]

Are the login functions any different in 2.7 from 2.6? I just wrote in the WP + bbPress integration forum about having successfully integrated WP 2.6 and bbPress 0.9 logins by just overriding all the WP pluggable cookie functions via a plugin with code copied right from WP 2.5’s pluggable.php file. I was thinking I could just do the same for 2.7…

[superann]

I followed some of these instructions and completely integrated WP 2.6.2 and bbPress 0.9 logins on my site today (BayAnime.com). I’d already had 2.6 up and running when I installed bbPress and didn’t want to roll back (I really need to roll forward at some point), so I just copied and pasted all the old WP 2.5 cookie functions from pluggable.php into a separate plugin file for my 2.6 install, set all the paths and keys, and it’s working well. I expect you can just do the same with WP 2.7 if you want to integrate it with bbPress 0.9. Anyway just wanted to report that it IS possible to get 2.6 (and up probably) working with bbPress 0.9 without too much more pain. If anyone’s interested in the plugin file that has the WP 2.5 functions you need, just let me know!

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Oh! Okay, that makes a little more sense. I can’t see why it would matter if you integrated (I’m integrated and I see naught on BB1.0a6/WP2.7), though.

Edit UNLESS it’s a charset issue. See this

[chrishajer]

I think he means that quotes and apostrophes are displaying with a in front of them. Like it’s being escaped and never un-escaped.

So, instead of “It’s Great” you would see “It’s Great” on display.

The issue in the past only occured when integrated with WordPress, IIRC.

I would avoid editing core files.

[refueled]

I know these have been done before, but I have released 3 blank bbPress themes that match my blank WordPress themes.

You can download them here.

I’ve also taken a long break from bbPress theme development. I’m getting back into it, so expect more themes for bbPress soon.

[John James Jacoby]

If I can throw out some input, having felt both sides of this debate multiple times, I think the bbPress audience is just looking for a little more information than maybe what is presented publically, and hoping that maybe it’s delivered with a little more public relations than it is firm moderation.

Lets take a moment to be honest with each other. The bbPress website, as a whole, is in bad shape. The documentation is old and outdated, transversing multiple versions and subversions of code with no WordPress style codex to whisper about. To offer a bit of perspective to everyone, bbPress is following WordPress in it’s development style, and remember that bbPress isn’t even 1.0, and WordPress is at 2.7. Where do you think bbPress will be when it is at version 2.7?

While we’re all used to how WordPress works and how convenient it is to have years of experience and knowledge to build off of, bbPress just isn’t to that level yet, and it isn’t fair to expect for it to be.

I feel that the bbPress site needs a serious update, just like the WordPressMU site does. There needs to be some uniformity and some solid public relations going on to get the message across to answer these questions before they even begin to be thoughts in a users mind, and no offense to anyone but a sticky topic isn’t enough, even though there isn’t a sticky anymore. Even if the product is free, it’s still a product, there are reputations on the line, and ultimately someone is investing in Automattic to help pay Sam’s bills, so someone needs to be nice to the customers, even if they’re not paying a dime.

Sam, if you’re listening, I’d love to help restyle bbPress.org to help it more accurately match WordPress.org/com. I would have suspected this was something done by someone specific within Automattic, but I think I remember reading that you styled it specifically yourself. If it will help take some of the burden off of you, I’d love to help out in anyway that I can.

[johnmc]

Speaking for myself, and possibly a large number of others, the main reason for wanting to use v1.0 is WordPress integration. If there was a plugin for 0.9 to make it play nicely with newer versions of WordPress, then that would be awesome and might keep the rabble happy for a while. As it stands, the only choice if you’re running a version of WordPress that’s any way recent is to go with the bbPress Alpha.

[Asbjørn Ulsberg]

Thanks, Sam. I’ve sent you an e-mail.

[_ck_]

The news about bbPress on that blog is just rehashing news elsewhere (and it’s a month out of date at that). 2009 will indeed be a big year for *development* for bbPress 1.0 – but that doesn’t mean 1.0 should be adopted for use on live sites in 2009.

I don’t know how to explain it any further that 1.0 is not simply a continuance of 0.9, it’s about 50% rewritten. 0.9 was reaching a certain maturity but now virtually every major function has been changed in some way that makes it more complex (for the same functionality).

You’re not using code in 1.0 that’s been proven stable in 0.9, you are using code that’s been rewritten to mimic the functionality of 0.9 with complexity added to force the use of BackPress (essentially WordPress core functions). Not only does the added bulk slow things down, but it degrades the proven stability that was in 0.9 because the new code is not thoroughly tested.

You shouldn’t be nagging about 1.0 over here, the key question you should be nagging developers about is over on the WordPress side: When will WordPress use BackPress? If it’s not going to (anytime soon) what was the point in rushing to break a stabilized bbPress to make it use Backpress and why are people rushing to use bbPress 1.0 when it’s not finished?

I think there was only one problem: it’s that 0.9 never got support for the cookies in WP 2.7 so way too many people rushed to 1.0 despite heavy warnings not to do so, somehow thinking they know better, or worse, that they’d just nag about any problems they have and get some kind of priority fix.

I am considering releasing a plugin to make 0.9 work with WP 2.6-2.8 cookies to stop this nonsense once and for all however people still won’t be able to downgrade unless I also make another plugin to downgrade the database also. But it’s a lot of work and I have little motivation since I would never use WP 2.7+ myself.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

@kevinjohngallagher – I got it from the horse’s mouth. She posted it on her blog and in her Blog Herald post last Friday.

WordPress News, scroll down to bbPress On Fire.

And yeah, the ‘follow the blog’ was partly tongue-in-cheek (I know updates are sparse), but also serious (as it is the best place to get ‘this has changed’ news). The blog will be updated when there’s news to update. And if there are long gaps between posts, well, it’s not a dev-blog. The forums are kind of the dev blog right now.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I think we all love _ck_ for her plugins, and her attempts to help the community before and after she was made a Mod, but if she and other Mods have “had it up to here” with the same posts being made and the same questions being asked all the time; maybe it’s time to change the website which gives this the false /conflicting/confusing information?

We can’t tell people to look at Trac for info on bugs/releases/roadmaps, and then complain when they get confused by the conflicting information.

I’m also don’t find Joel’s blog too helpful, but that’s not to say that some project management isn’t necessary simply because it’s an open source project. But rather than taking the comments about leadership/ownership of the project on the chin, it’s apparently easier to discredit/deflect from the man making the comments – i mean, seriously, who cares if wikipedia doesn’t list Joel as a developer? Does that mean the man doesn’t know that keeping Trac/Gantt chart/documentation/bug list etc up to date greatly increases productivity and keeps a project focussed?

Or is it because he worked for “Microsoft, so he couldn’t be more opposite in thinking to open-source web based code development”. Are we just presuming now that if you happen to take a wage that you’re fundamentally against free or open source software? I take a wage for a company that wont be releasing it’s software, am i now in the “couldn’t be more opposite in thinking to open-source web based code development” simply because of my day job? Or is it easier to shoot down people making comments based on presumptions moderators have about anyone who places feeding their wives and children above working a 9-5 for an open source software foundation?

I see, it’s cos it’s easier to shoot down questions and comments rather than have a discussion.

(btw _ck_, the guy left Microsoft over 9 years ago. 9. years. maybe we can let that one go.)

@Ipstenu:

Hey dude, can i ask where you got his info from:

Now Lorelle (from Lorelle on WordPress, a name many folks may be familiar with) has intimated that this will be a ‘big’ year for bbPress.

It seems great news, but in the same way that Sam lets us know that he’s been focussed on non-BBpress projects 7 replies down a random forum post; it worries me that finding out this cool info is getting harder and harder.

Follow the bbPress blog. You’ll get your answer when you do

I kinda hope that’s tongue-in-cheek , with 5 posts in 6 months (and 3 of them within 3 days of each other), the BBpress blog isn’t quite the bastian of information you might think. All it does it tell us when there’s a new release. It’s not not a blog as much as a list of release dates.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I suspect _ck_’s had it up to here with the same people asking the same questions. It does get a little wearing and if I were to link to every post that someone asked this ‘How long…’ question… well I may find the practical limit to post length Exaggeration a little, yes, but not as much as you’d think.

FWIW, I read Joel on Software frequently, but I disagree with him when it comes to the Open Source Solution. Locked Down software, like Office and such, are a totally different beast, and most Open Source developments start out herky-jerky (like BB and WP) and eventually smooth out into a sort of update schedule. But you can’t do that until you have a baked product, and when you’re re-inventing things, you can’t give a firm deadline because there is no way you can quantify the time it takes to be inventive. Open Source created a new development roadmap, and that map is still very young and very tentative. It took a decade or more to get commercial software where it is today. Open Source has been around since the 60s, but it didn’t really become a ‘thing’ until 1998. And Open Source development, where anyone can pitch in? Whooof! A lot of folks never even saw that coming as more than a passing fancy.

Now Lorelle (from Lorelle on WordPress, a name many folks may be familiar with) has intimated that this will be a ‘big’ year for bbPress. What does that mean? Dunno, but I suspect now that WP is a grownup, it’s time to burn creative juices over on bbPress. Which still does not mean you’ll get bb 1.0/release any time soon.

Be patient. Read the posts people have already made. Follow the bbPress blog. You’ll get your answer when you do

[feastoffools]

Amen nv1962!

We’re just patiently waiting for bbpress to sync up with wordpress, or look elsewhere for a solution. I’m kind of getting tired of seeing people complaining about bbpress, and developers complaining about how people want to integrate bbpress into wordpress (login, profiles and entries).

What are the alternatives to waiting for bbpress to catch up to wordpress?