Let me give you a little unofficial insight (half my opinion, half fact).
Automattic has millions in investment funding, it’s not going away, neither is bbPress.
But right now bbPress doesn’t make any money for Matt – in fact, it’s the opposite, it costs him to pay people to code it – so you won’t see lots of money thrown into developing it. bbPress was originally written by Matt to run the WordPress.org forums but it’s new goal is apparently to eventually power TalkPress (a forums version of WordPress.com)
Currently Sam is the only one working on bbPress but that’s only because other resources are being diverted to other projects. There have been at one time three or maybe four developers (including Matt) on bbPress. Just because there is only one person working on it now is NOT a sign that it is going away. It’s simply because Matt has only so many coders and needs them elsewhere. (You may notice Michael is temporarily MIA).
The people complaining were obviously not around for WordPress development and haven’t read any history about it. WordPress was nearly the EXACT same way. Until there was a commercial project based on it (ie. WordPress.com) development was in bursts. Nothing for weeks, and then a frenzy, before a new release.WordPress didn’t really make it’s mark until 2.0 – 2.1, then it took off and then Matt could justify paying lots of people to support it.
Like I keep saying but no one listens, bbPress is PRE-RELEASE software. It’s not even 1.0 yet. And just like WordPress, people who come onboard someday at version 2.0 – 2.1 will wonder what the heck you were complaining about.
If you are using bbPress right now, you are an EARLY ADOPTER.
You are experiencing EARLY ADOPTER BLUES.
Some people complain, some people try to contribute, some people go elsewhere.
WordPress plugins do not work inside bbPress. The advice is normally to port it from WordPress to bbPress but I don’t believe I’ve seen any documentation on how to do that.
frooyo, thank you. That was (to me) helpful and explanatory.
My guess is that until bbPress stops being used as WordPress’s forum of choice, it will continue to have a future. At that point, worry.
> An employee only has to report his results to his employer
Yes, and so what? I’m asking is he employee or not
That information is confidential in many states. No one is required to tell someone who they work for, even for insurance (your insurance has the right to turn you down due to lack of trust in that case, but still). As such, that question can be dismissed as ‘not your business’, pardon me for the crudity 
So here’s my question for you. Towards what end will you go with the information of Sam’s employment? If you find out that yes, he is an Automattic employee and assigned to bbPress, will that make you react differently than if you found out, say, he was assigned to bbPress, WordPress and was asked to fill in at Akismet?
Basically this: Why does it matter who he works for?
If you’re asking ‘Why is bbPress development so slow?’ you could just ask that and anyone would tell you: There are few developers working on it at the moment. Cause the only other question I can find is like when you watch Survivor, and the Jury person says ‘My question for the finalists is that you suck.’ While entertaining to watch, it’s not a question. 
Not recommended for SEO though. Duplicate content is a nono for google.
Just tried the plugin,
Would be great if Sam made a “noindex” or “noarchive” option just for those topics in the forum. It would then show the topics in the forum, add comments to the blog when replied in the forum, and just index the wordpress post.
Having said that,
It doesn’t list the latest topics if I try the widget, even after having set the forum url in the settings and such. Using alpha 1.06 bbpress and WP 2.7. The plugins (xmpp?) in bbpress are also activated.
Once 1.0 beta is released things will be far more solid.
You have to understand that 1.0 is almost a 75% re-write (or re-structuring) of 0.9 so many things have changed. To an end user it seems the same but that’s because of much backwards compatibility work by Sam.
bbPress 1.0 is 150% the code size of 0.9
So when 1.0 goes beta, that would be a good time to start documentation.
You used to be able to do this with BB Sync. With the new versions, I think there is a bbPress plugin for WordPress.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-live/
The plugin author posted how to use it a while back but I can’t seem to find it. If you’re using WordPress 2.7 and the alpha of bbPress, I think bbpress-live is the way to go.
I have done all of this. The AUTH keys are identical in both the WordPress and bbPress config files. The cookie name is, I think, correct. I have posted parts of my config files here:
[links to keys removed by moderator chrishajer]
Thanks for any help. Like I said, the only thing that doesn’t work is the shared login part. I can not test these while at work, but any suggestions you can give will be tried when I get home. Thanks.
Ipstenu; I’m not requesting at all just suggesting in case CK has another inspired day and has an unrestrained need of writing another guide. Just that, no demand.
Dump all your cookies and cache. If you’re using Firefox, you can actually leave your cookies open while browsing, so with that open, log back into WP.
Make a note of your cookies.
Log in to BB. See if the cookies have the same name. You should have about 6 or so called wordpress_LONGSTRING and if you look at those cookies, the folder locations will be / or /forums or /blog etc etc. If they’re NOT the same cookie name, then you have missmatched AUTH keys in your forum.
I am having (probably) the same problem as techlover. I can integrate the user database and user accounts work in both WordPress and bbPress. I can even allow people to register in either since they both use the same user database.
However, I have to login / out of each one seperately. That’s almost what I want. I integrated with the same versions mentioned above and it went farily smooth. Now, I would just like the login cookies to log me in and out of both sites.
Yikes, really sorry if I offended anyone above. I haven’t looked into the project so much that I’m aware of the employment/progress etc. and was honestly just delighted to find ck’s post as it thoroughly explained everything I was looking for.
ganzua – While documenting the unstable may appear useful, it’s a stone cold mother to realize, six months later, that all your work was for nothing, because things were re-written. In order to discourage burnout, never have the tech writers start until you have it baked.
I have BBpress running on one site too, but I really want it to become as good as WordPress, because BBpress already rocks (even though it’s in Alpha)! I just want to say, keep up the good work!
I wonder if anyone can help, I have set up a bbPress forum within my WP installation. I have user accounts synced as described and have had good success pulling in topics into my WP homepage, and customising the theme.
I wondered if someone could point me in the right direction for my main problem though. I would like each new post that is made in WordPress to be copied and started also as a new topic in the bbPress forum. Going further than this, having WP comments act as replies to the bbPress topic would be great, but in the first instance I really just need a post to be duplicated as a new topic in bbPress.
Many thanks in advance.
You can’t document something until it’s in a stable state.
we could call it “document of the unstable” 
I have a suggestion for chapter two; a juicy thread on producing custom loops.
I am on the verge of writing something about my experience of creating a bbPress plugin as a set of guideposts for others to make use of
I’m pretty sure your guide will be very welcome
What part isn’t working?
If you login to bbPress, what happens on WordPress? What happens when you log out?
Please be descriptive. “It doesn’t work” is near impossible to debug (I spent my day arguing that there is a difference between ‘The page gave me a 404 error’ and ‘your webserver is broken!’ and the latter was nearly useless to me)
You can either use this wp plugin;
http://www.atsutane.net/2006/11/bbpress-latest-discussion-for-wordpress/
or you can follow the guidelines provided here;
Here’s how to show bbPress info inside WordPress without full integration
sorry for the triple post! I have no idea what happened
triple-response available upon request if needed
johnjamesjacoby – This is my second attempt. First time His Majesty didn’t answer me. Next time I will ask Matt.
Or may be Wikipedia 
You wrote
WordPress didn’t have decent documentation until many years after it was around, don’t expect bbPress to be any different
I am on the verge of writing something about my experience of creating a bbPress plugin as a set of guideposts for others to make use of. Not sure how much it would count as “documentation” so much as a quick-start to get someone rolling.
You can’t document something until it’s in a stable state.
bbPress 1.0 is twice the size of bbPress 0.9 and constantly changing, even in the alpha.
Database functions have been mostly the same except the entire meta changed.
But the fundamentals are identical to how WordPress works so you can use the WP codex for that.
Oh and WordPress didn’t have decent documentation until many years after it was around, don’t expect bbPress to be any different. Unless someone volunteers for free, Matt is unlikely to waste paid employee time on documentation.
@ganzua: I predict that you are integrated with WordPress, and that your jQuery isn’t being loaded correctly.
I will prove this theory by asking for you to add a topic to your favorites on your forum, and report back and let me know if it works.
a nice substitute for some weighty bbPress documentation in the meantime
Actually some of us are looking forward the next chapter This one should go to the “documentation” section as an entry or something like this.
Can you get to it if you go directly to the admin site?
http://yourdomain.com/bbpress/bb-admin
It’s possible that you didn’t set up user integration correctly, and you are no longer the admin of your bbPress site.
Got everything to Integrate with no errors and everything seem to of went fine.
When someone registers, the username and password is good in both the forum and wordpress.
But is the integration supposed to work for login and logout, I mean if a person logs into WordPress are they supposed to be logged into bbpress at the same time.
If they are it seems to not be working for me, I can log into the forums and still have to log into WordPress same thing logging out am I missing something.
I know it was a clean and no error install and followed the tutorial completely.
Thanks for all your hard work man.
Chris
