[kevinjohngallagher]

I was thinking about this on the way home. I think Forums as a Category is a great example. It was a plugin by _ck_ which was (for me) essential in 0.9; but it’s essentially a (hope i got the american term right) “band-aid”. Basically, if you worked within it’s boundaries, and accepted it’s issue – it did exactly what it said on the tin.

The thing is, it was then rolled into the 1.0core without any form of thought. Now we’re “stuck” with something that could have been a great feature with 2 days of dev time.

Forum as a category should have been in the forum table, as a 1-to-1 relationship. Every forum is either yes/no. Its no more meta than the name.

To the next level, the bbpress definition of a category is any forum that is both read only and has child forums. Thats daft. Don’t get me wrong, it was a needed/ideal/susynct work around for 0.9; but no scoping/checking/planning done before rolling it into the core. I remember during one of the BigBrother last evictions I told one of our staff to make a particular forum read only for a minute (which triggered all the category restrictions no showing of posts etc).

No harm done, i thought, until people couldn’t navigate or read their own posts as categories are given different theming. circa 1000 screaming teeny-boppers and lonely housewives on a shout-box!!

Its little things like that, where as a plugin, heck even a “core plugin” we can fix it quickly. As soon as it enters the core…

[John James Jacoby]

Pete and I talked about this in #bbpress last night a little bit. Using WP post types lets us inherit all this neat stuff, but much of it isn’t really /needed/…

Like Forum/Topic/Reply revisions, comments, thumbnails, excerpts, etc… Sure there’s lots of neat ways those things could be used, but they don’t help keep things trim and tidy.

Would love to get some good feedback on this!

[kevinjohngallagher]

Matt, I just wanted to quickly say thank you for coming back to bbPress.org forums and answering questions and communicating with us. There are a lot of passionate people here. We might not all agree on the direction, but I can tell you that already your presence (and JJJ and Pete) has helped morale immensely.

CitizenKeith always phrases things better than my celtic tongue does.

[John James Jacoby]

Thinking part of the JS minify issue may have been not emptying the cache after changing the settings. Before I wasn’t automatically uploading the changes to the CDN.

Seems to be fine now, and can’t duplicate it when I want to see it.

If you really want it minified, I’m happy to get the plugin author involved in testing, to see if it’s a w3tc or bbPress issue.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I can shed some light on that.

Matt, I apologise in advance for this; but the constant slog in using this website in the months since the “bbpress2.0” theme release has been very tough. Did you know the homepage was a 404 for almost a week? And text was under 8px if you weren’t on a Mac or Linux. Patches and Changes were uploaded, changes not tested. We’ve a 6 page thread on it somewhere (it was sticked in the last 48 hours).

Anyway, the worst of those bugs meant that all HTML was parsed without exceptions (it wasn’t added to BackPress), so for just under 8 weeks, every single line of code we type into this forum has been converted to lots of & lts; and & gts; etc. It’s made giving solutions… difficult. Especially when copy/pasting. Especially for non PHP people.

Someone fixed the bug and added the fix to BackPress, but no-one picks up on the BackPress trac / forums (was bumped for 5 weeks) and no mails in the mailing list by a developer for almost 16 weeks. Eventually I reached out to Westi, who was awesome (no surprise really), and he stepped up and applied the patch (actually a few patches for us). It took another 13 days for it to be applied to this website. (I am also confident he’s now v easily contactable for everyone about backPress)

I ain’t intending on dredching up the past man, just… I know there’s some “ill will” around right now. Its not about “5 years of pent up anger” or anything like you said in the other post, it’s about last week, last month, the month before that etc.

With no intention of starting a long debate, would you have let the WordPress.org homepage be a 404 page for almost a week?

If no-one could give code exmaples on the WP.org support forums, would that have lasted from May to July?

We all drop the ball dude, its life, but if you wanted bbPress to help itself, it did. Ok, so not brilliantly or specacularly but it’s the dependancies placed upon us let us down, and the people we depended on were too busy making publicly disparaging comments at their WordCamp KeyNote speeches.

I often wonder if objectively you’d look at this post and think how you’ve done with bbPress: http://ma.tt/2009/08/kill-your-community/

I’m really glad you’re here and I’m thankful for your tone. I’m thankful for the information you’re giving. I, and I’m sure many others, are ok with us disagreeing on things, it’s the uncertainty coupled with the lack of respect (WordCamp comment + this website constantly breaking) thats stoked the flames of discontent.

In honesty bro, fair crack of the whip + information to make up our own mind = happy + repsectful community.

P.S. Sorry for the WTFmatt person. and haha, someone will be along to apologise for me in a minute

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

I am also in favor of using bbPress 0.9 as a standalone forum script rather than upcoming bbPress plugin.

Thanks for bringing this up!

[citizenkeith]

I greatly appreciate the consideration of using 2.0 instead of 1.2 which will at least slow down some confusion and make people realize the true weight of it as more than an update (and entirely different program).

Even from just a marketing perspective, calling the plugin 2.0 just has more impact. You’ll get more people adopting it, more feedback, more developers. It’s a win all around, IMHO.

Matt, I just wanted to quickly say thank you for coming back to bbPress.org forums and answering questions and communicating with us. There are a lot of passionate people here. We might not all agree on the direction, but I can tell you that already your presence (and JJJ and Pete) has helped morale immensely.

[Alex Luft]

You had a brilliant creation with 0.7, extremely lightweight and had the potential to be a pure framework and circumvent much of the legacy which shackles WP, but it’s all come full circle now and I simply cannot get behind such a radical reversion.

_CK_, could you go in a little more detail as to what you mean by the “shackles WP part?”

Just curious.

[citizenkeith]

It’s a natural tension. I think the best way to split the difference is to keep the core lean and mean, and then to have a set of pre-packaged plugins that are included in the main download that can be turned on (or can even default to being on).

This gets my vote as well. Instead, I would prefer the next version of bbPress to have more powerful admin features (see Kevin John’s above examples for specifics).

[John James Jacoby]

Spent the past week or so testing a few larger BuddyPress/bbPress installations with W3TC, and I can say that it works a treat with the bundled version of bbPress we tuck in there too.

Experienced the same JS minify on the inline JS also actually. Wonder if it’s a bug. I’ll see what I can dig up.

[John James Jacoby]

Always loved this idea personally. As a 2004 phpBB2.x graduate, I was constantly trying to make my forum software do stuff it wasn’t intended to do. This brings me back to those days.

[John James Jacoby]

I think the way it would make the most sense is for it to work kind of how the Blogs component does now. If you don’t have multi-site turned on, the Blogs component is kind of dormant.

I imagine we would pull bbPress out of the buddypress.zip, and instead have BuddyPress be more ‘bbPress aware’ so to speak. It would see if it’s already installed and if it’s active, then BuddyPress Forums lights up and is available for fun adventures.

This way we’ll be able to separate the need for forums to be linked to groups, which has been an area of debate since we went that way. Forums could really be used for almost anything now!

[johnhiler]

I think most developers who run highly trafficked websites will prefer keeping stuff out of the core, to minimize bloat and to maximize scaling. Whereas most casual webmasters running a smaller forum will want as much in the core as possible.

It’s a natural tension. I think the best way to split the difference is to keep the core lean and mean, and then to have a set of pre-packaged plugins that are included in the main download that can be turned on (or can even default to being on). I think WordPress experimented with this direction last year? Not sure where it ended up though.

A few things were moved out of bbPress plugins into core, and it hasn’t really gone that well. “Subscribe to topic” was added to the core, and then promptly had a problem with spammed topics being blasted out over email. It’s a lot easier to apply a patch to a plugin than it is to get the patch approved in the core.

The “Page Links for bbPress” plugin was also moved into the core in 1.0. There were a number of code inefficiencies in that code that are now locked into the core. There was a recent patch released for the plugin version of Page Links (only for 0.9) that fixed this; that’s an example of how it can be helpful to keep non-essential stuff out of core.

[_ck_]

As far as your question about bbpress as plugin, it’s going to be many many months before there’s an official release. If it’s done this year it certainly will be a fraction of what bbPress is currently (it’s nearly a complete rewrite).

Back to your cookie problem, keys are not the only issue. You have to make sure your cookie path in both bbPress and WordPress are the same, depending on where each are installed. There are a few integration topics about this, though bbPress has evolved to the point where you can change things more easily now.

[kevinjohngallagher]

This is an excellent point Matt, and actually one of the strong selling points of bbPress in the past 18months has been how little is in the core.

I, like i’m sure others out there, have had wrangles with moulding bbPress to work in the way I’d like (e.g. between 4-7 clicks to delete a user, and having to leave the admin area to do it, and not be able to do it in bulk = eek). But other than some core hacks (like adding actions / filters all over the shop), it can be modified quite nicely. I often describe bbPress as “90% there”. In part, down to the excellent base, and in large part to _ck_’s plugins.

That said, I feel that one of the issues with the current development line “we” kick started in December time is that we took 2 feautres which worked brialliantly as plugins and added them to the core; without any real need for that to happen.

Why? because they were features for the end-end user. Not the person running the forum. It’s like the people who say that people won’t post on their forums without a WYSIWYG editor or Smilies, we could add them to the core, loads of folks would be happy, but we’d still not be able to moderate all those nicely styled posts with loads of ” ZoMg >.<” etc

If you look at the features you’ve added to the core of WordPress, they rarely have been for the sole benfit of the person reading the blog. They’ve mostly been to benefit the person running the blog, in the theory that that enables the end-user too.

So reguardless of what version of bbPress/WordPress/other-software we’re talking about, even if somethings in the 80/20 split, please think who it benefits and who it causes issues for. We all know there’s good and bad to every decision, but let me assure you, i’m losing sleep over moderating a bbpress forum with anonymouse posting!

WP3.0 was effectively a “developer release”, or at least not end-end-user focussed. Not sure about you, but I think it’s the smoothest, least-buggy, most impressive release in a long long time. Maybe thats what bbPress needed instead of adding core features we already had as plugins.

Of course, hindsight, pretty wonderful thing.

[_ck_]

I greatly appreciate the consideration of using 2.0 instead of 1.2 which will at least slow down some confusion and make people realize the true weight of it as more than an update (and entirely different program).

I have to be honest though, I’ll probably be just going on my way once that plugin version is officially released to gold and the standalone versions become legacy.

You had a brilliant creation with 0.7, extremely lightweight and had the potential to be a pure framework and circumvent much of the legacy which shackles WP, but it’s all come full circle now and I simply cannot get behind such a radical reversion.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Dammit,

_ck_ I updated my plugin 2 weeks ago.

I’ll post it here in 20 when I’m home. I thought I’d put a download link on my website, but i must have bumped it with all the talking over the last week.

[johnnydoe]

as for me and for my usage, i need a fast and lightweight solution, so no blog front- and backend needed.

imho a better idea would be probably a pure and ultralight framework (let’s call it wp-cortex ) with an option to install a blog, a forum or both via plugins.

[Matt Mullenweg]

Probably what we will do is have the bbPress.org plugins section pull from plugins in the core WP directory with a certain tag, like how BuddyPress does it. We could probably keep the existing bbP directory running in a different directory to give people time to transition.

[Matt Mullenweg]

It should be even more seamless than it is now, possibly even included with the default BuddyPress package. (But I’ll defer to core BP people there.)

[jmharrington]

I was able to easily solve my issue by finding one careless mistake. In my wp-config.php file I simply copied the authentication keys (4 of them) and pasted them into my bbpress’s config.php file. What I did not notice is that in wp-config.php they keys are prefixed like this:

define(‘AUTH_KEY’,’my unique key is here’);

While in the bbpress config.php, the keys are prefix like this:

define( ‘BB_AUTH_KEY’,’my unique key is here’ );

The only difference is AUTH_KEY versus BB_AUTH_KEY, but that made the difference. Hope this helps technotip…

thanks _ck_ for emphasizing the auth keys

[Matt Mullenweg]

Not a bad idea. I’m hanging out on #bbpress if anyone wants to chat, but it’s unlikely I’ll be able to commit personally to any regular meetings this month or the next.

[Gautam Gupta]

I just had a suggestion – when the plugin would be public and this site’s posts converted, we could have an if statement above the topic like

if ( topic_date is before bla bla date || one of the topic_tags == 'bb_old' ) { /* load a message which says that this is for bb 1.1 and below, this doesn't apply to the new plugin */ }

But I’m also not against changing its name or having its version as 2.0.

[Matt Mullenweg]

I’ll ping Ben to see if we can’t get that on the site proper.

[Matt Mullenweg]

_ck_ maybe my tastes have changed? It’s not a perfect name but it does have historical significant and attachment for me. The integration will be the completion of the arc that started with my first checkin, because I felt the data structures of author-started versus user-started discussions were fundamentally different, and I could do it much faster on a DB structure just like minibb, which is what we used to use on WordPress.org and one of the first forums I really liked. (After attempting vBulletin and phpBB a number of times.)

We also have a history of major changes in 0.1 releases. We might indulge in a little bit of inflation with a 2.0.

I’ve been wondering that if addition to being part of the plugin directory for people already using WP, we could offer a pre-bundled download here on bbPress.org that could set up WP + bbP seamlessly so from a user experience point of view they’re still getting a “standalone” piece of software, just with a far more robust admin and update system. (Just a thought, we’ll figure it out when we get there.)