[hpguru]

Hello,

I noticed a bug in bbPress, when editing message title. When using url rewriting option, bbPress doesn’t fix the url to the htaccess file.

Change title First forums to First forum

URL (No change) = …forums/first-forums

Can somebody repair that?

[jpanizzoli]

I’m having a similar problem (404 error when using Pretty Permalinks) and assumed it was the .htaccess file. But where do I get the code to add to the .htaccess file to make things work properly? Would I need to adjust my main .htaccess file (outside of bbpress) – or is there an .htaccess file for BBPress. I don’t see an .htaccess file in BBPress anywhere…

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Try here: http://phpxref.ftwr.co.uk/bbpress/nav.html?_variables/index.html

I use that when I’m trying to understand how it all ties in.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

whitewall, check this thread: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/del-sol-owners-club

[clyk]

Hi!

I’m using the post notification plugin ( http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/post-notification/)

I’m wondering if there is an opportunity that i’ll get the actual post instead of just getting a notification…

I guess I would have to change that:

$message = __(“There is a new post on: %1$s nReply by: %2$s nn%3$s “);

but have no idea how…

Anybody any help for me?

Cheers!

[lookfab]

I’ve read the threads on the problem with 0.9.0.4 and php4. For example:

Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode()!

Are we going to see a version before 1.0 that I can run properly without upgrading the server to php5?

[lookfab]

_ck_ paints a pretty bleak picture for bbpress 1.0. A pointless rewrite of 50% of the code, which neutralizes much of the benefit of having the beta in the wild for all this time. Extra bulk and slower performance.

Sam’s response reads like a carefully worded validation.

Sounds like a lack of information is the least of our problems.

[whitewall]

It would nice to get links to your BP & WP intergrations.

[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 The documentation is old and outdated, transversing multiple versions and subversions of code with no WordPress style codex to whisper about.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.

[Sam Bauers]

I’d just like to say that _ck_ is well qualified to answer questions about just about every aspect of bbPress, including this topic. I can’t fault the information she gave in her replies here.

@Malice

You should be able to upgrade from anything as far back as perhaps bbPress 0.8 to any later version. Upgrade paths are generally kept smooth, but downgrading is an issue.

@johnmc

I’ve looked into making 0.9 compatible with WP2.7, but the changes it would introduce would probably make 0.9 less stable than 1.0-alpha and take a long time to complete.

[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.

[John James Jacoby]

I was going to recommend BuddyPress as soon as I read this. I’ve got bbPress fully integrated right now and highly recommend it for someone looking to do a pseudo-social networking site, or even an e-zine with some basic social abilities. (Sam, I’m interested in the memcache plugin though, gotta look into that. Thanks!)

[sumit1988]

nobody cares if bbPress stable will be ready in many months _ck_. I think the biggest problem here is this:

The community: we, us, who use bbPress (alpha or not) report bugs, try all, use your plugins, make it public… we are also a piece of the “raise of bbPress”. We are all very thankfull for the work that you guys do, but what if nobody use it? It would be work for nothin. And it’s just a thing of respect and good will to get the community informated. So if e.g. you don’t know when its ready, dont write “stop asking” or “ready when ready”… try instead “i don’t know” …? So all of us will wait for a reply from someone that knows. Like Sam. And he replied. And it was really informative for us all. Lots of ppl like me are a little happier now, so where is the problem? Chill…

(sorry if you cant understand my english)

and just for my personal info: are you (_ck_) working on bbPress itself? or “just” the plugins? Because why reply you always to this questions if the question is not for you (when you’re not working on core product)?

[_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)]

Don’t confuse ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘tell us what you’re thinking’ with ‘I can say anything I want and you have to keep the post up.’

I don’t advocate deleting a post without explaining why, however bbPress mods have the right to delete any post they don’t want to have on the site for any reason. I also don’t assume ‘they hate me’ or ‘they don’t want to hear this’ when I post feedback that is a bit of criticism and the post is deleted. There are a lot of reasons to delete a post. Maybe it was felt this wasn’t a post for public discussion, or they wanted to mull it over without having a deluge mud-slinging (which even if your post wasn’t offensive at all, we’ve seen how people get when they get riled up).

In lieu of guidelines, one can fairly assume only this, and little more: Posting is at the discretion of the people who own and maintain the site.

[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?

[deadlyhifi]

What are the odds that I will be able to keep all my topics and accounts by the time bbpress hits 1.0 stable?

I’d say that this would be the most fundamental aspect of backwards compatibility, and since the accounts table is based on WordPress there should be no issue there. Equally, topics, posts, times, etc. can’t have too many differences to warrant non-compatibility.

Things will be accelerating for bbPress soon due to some internal work at Automattic. This is occupying a lot of my time right now, but it will all be fed back into bbPress in the near future.

It’s really good to hear this. May I presume the folks over BuddyPress are getting involved?

As it stands I am running v1.06 on a fairly large website (due to various reasons I had to do it) and have found it to be very stable at high volume. My biggest issue has been fending off feature requests from the users. The biggest being ability to sort by topic id as well as last response time.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who is working on bbPress. I think it is a very promising and exciting project that will, coupled with WP and BuddyPress, be a very powerful software.

[whitewall]

We still haven’t given up with this, after taking a look at the BuddyPress plugin this combo seems even more interesting and maybe even something we could put some extra effort and coding resources to get things sorted out and working in a way that fits into our plan. I’ll keep you informed.

[Malice]

I was dumb enough to install an alpha version on a running website.

What are the odds that I will be able to keep all my topics and accounts by the time bbpress hits 1.0 stable?

[kevinjohngallagher]

Apparently the post has now been removed also, which i must say is really odd.

For those interested, it was at…

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/how-to-help-us-help-bbpress

[kevinjohngallagher]

I have to say, i’m a little offended that my forum post has been closed, some 9 minutes after posting.

It is in the correct section (requests & feedback), doesn’t swear or flame anyone.

It gives high level list of where i think we are falling down (or as i call it feedback) and suggests ways we can improve upon that feedback (requests). While not praising everything BBpress, i felt the tone was one of how we can work together to improve this product.

Maybe i’m missing something, but i think closing down this sort of discussion, especially in the “Requests and Feedback — Tell us what you’re thinking” section is somewhat draconian.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I write this in response to the growing posts and their ever-increasing angrier responses from moderators, to people who are simply asking for clarification of (mis-)information.

The problem we have, as a community, is that we have no communication nor project management involved with BBpress.

COMMUNICATION

A great example would be:

How many more ALPHA’s before BETA?

_ck_ rightly points out, and then gets angry at the poster, people are constantly asking the same questions. The bit _ck_ misses is that they are not pointless to a lot of people, or indeed one person, even if they are pointless to her. The point that hasn’t seen to be grasped by Sam/Moderators is that have an external facing Trac website that says one thing, when another is true, which is why people are asking the same questions over and over.

Instead of getting angry at people, why not change the date on Trac?? Even if you put it at 1st Jan 2010, it’s at least in the future and closer to being realistic than 1.0Beta 2 months ago.

I brought this up in October, and then again in December, and now again in February, but people who are new to this project or maybe not as involved ask _ck_ get their information from the website; but this info has been wrong for over 5 months. Which is why people are asking for clarification!

If you give people wrong/bad/out of date information, you have to accept that they will ask questions about it on the forum. It’s been the nature of humans throughout history, and we’re not going to change simply because it’s BBpress (sadly).

Given that the issue could be fixed by a BBpress person (not sure about user roles here so don’t want to presume that a forum mod could do it or if we need to wait for Sam); maybe we should stop being rude to people and fix it?

<u>A further example:</u>

It’s great that _ck_ knows that alpha 7 will break her plugins; but what about everyone else? Where is the blog post? Where is the forum post by Sam? Where is the sticky? Where is the announcement? Etc.

After much searching it turns out that 3 weeks ago _ck_ made a post about it, which has been off the front page of the forums section for the last 15 days. Brilliantly meaning that if you didn’t read the BBpress forums for a 5 day period at the start of February for any reason, then you won’t know about these massive changes. At the risk of appearing sarcastic, does anyone else think that maybe this should be the sort of thing we should Sticky/announce/keep on front page? Shouldn’t this sort of thing come from Sam?

But regardless it just re-emphasises the fact that communication about BBpress is close to non-existant.

TRAC

Devs and Moderators tell us to use Trac, and then are surprised that people are confused about the roadmap saying that Beta comes out 01/08/08 .

Either update Trac so that people don’t get confused, or inform people in some another way (which is a little redundant as that is what the Trac roadmap is for).

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

It somewhat goes hand in hand with the communication aspect, but as any developer knows, rushing head first into coding with no long term view quickly becomes fruitless.

As a community, and i’m in no way saying that Sam answers to us (really want to make that clear), we have no freaking idea what the heck is going on at any given time. We’re either given an ever changing answer by a moderator, or we’re told that Sam will tell us (like the voice behind the curtain), or we’re left with the (wrong) info on the website.

Every change comes out of no-where.

We have no idea what the short, medium and long terms goals are.

As much as this software is ‘free’, anyone planning to use it on a website at least wants to plan a little in advance.

It’s very difficult to want to help/take pride/give back to an open source project when we’re constantly told “it’s ready when it’s ready stop asking” – and in fact shows a total lack of project management and control.

Who runs the BBpress project?

Do they know/can they answer:

– how many scheduled man hours until alpha 7?

– are people assigned to work on it, or have they been moved elsewhere?

– what is the testing time on alpha 7?

– how long and we holding open bug acceptance for alpha 7?

– what is the due date for alpha 7?

– what is the likelihood of hitting that date?

– what are the dependant factors?

– what impact does alpha 7 have on existing installations?

– have the testers been informed of this?

– have the contributors been informed of this?

– what potential conflicts are there between current versions and alpha 7?

I’m not specifically looking for answers btw, as I said before Sam doesn’t answer to us, but I’m not sure I believe that ANYONE related with this project can answer those questions, and that is really really worrying.

IT IS FREE – THEREFORE IT IS OK.

Free is good, free we like.

Free means we accept bugs.

Free means we accept it’s not ideal.

Free means we know we wont get a 100% fit to what we need.

Free doesn’t mean we accept no communication.

Free doesn’t mean we accept what communication we get being wrong.

Free doesn’t mean we accept no management.

Free doesn’t mean we should get slapped down for asking perfectly legitimate and reasonable questions.

Free doesn’t mean we should accept instant yet wide sweeping changes.

Free doesn’t mean we should accept a total lack of respect.

AUTOMATTIC IS NOT A COMMERCIAL COMPANY

It is.

No, really… it is, so can we please stop saying that it’s not. Sam, while a loveable rogue to be sure (and he’s very cute in his picture), he is not fucking Ghandi – he does this for a wage.

Automattic is not building BBpress out of the goodness of their hearts to save all the wee orphans of the world, they’re a company making a profit and paying people’s wages.

Lets drop the humanitarian line when someone makes a good point and the moderators want to slap it down, eh? Or am I wrong, is BBpress ending world hunger as we speak? No? ok, maybe lets stop this one then. Just a thought.

HOW TO FIX THIS.

At the risk of opening up an old wound, I made a list at Christmas time (the oh so fun Facebook thread).

Either pause development on BBpress 1.0alpha7 for a week, or engage someone else to do it but:

<u>Fix the website. </u> Seriously, spend time going through each static page (there are 20 of them) removing all the bogus/wrong/out of date information. Some pages are fine, some are really really out of date. Given how much has changed with BBpress since WP2.5 came out, if you haven’t updated a page since that time then you know it’s wrong before reading.

<u>Blog more. </u> Not in a twitter “I am eating an apple” way, but you’ve made 5 posts in over 6 months (and 3 of them were within 3 days of each other). That development blog is our window into the BBpress development. It says “hey, this project ain’t dead”; instead all it does now is say “we released this bit of software on this date”. It’s not a blog, there’s no info other than release dates of software that don’t work anymore (for the most part).

<u>Extend / Plugin section. </u> This drastically needs an overhaul. There needs to be an option to filter out plugins that either don’t work or haven’t been updated to the latest release. Lets be honest, some of these plugins are 2 years old, and as soon as you click into them that’s the first stat you see.

<u>Download section. </u> Kinda/probably/should/maybe say that if you download the latest version it won’t work with a wordpress install form the last 9 months. Even though it’s from the same company. And it says it does work in the About page. And says it again on the Integration page. Yeah, we should probably write the truth somewhere or people will keep asking…

<u>Trac. </u> Lets update Trac. If someone has an understanding of the project to the level that they can answer the Project Manager 101 questions above, then why not put some of that info into Trac? I’m confident (though it’s just my opinion) that people are more motivated to fix bugs if we know there are X outstanding before the next alpha, rather than a huge list that has be fixed in an unknown amount of time.

<u>Development documentation. </u> A tough one this, and time consuming. I get that, I really do. But it makes helping out really difficult. As someone with rusty PHP coding skills (I‘ve been a BA far too long), I find Navigating bbpress to be a pain, and while I understand wordpress comparisons aren’t favourable, documentation makes wordpress editing 1000 times easier.

<u>Give us an overview. </u> Sounds very simple, and most PM’s have an overview list for each project anyway (usually on a power point to fob directors off), but it would make life easier. Many of us still don’t know what ‘features’ are standard with BBpress and which will only be available via plugin. Many of us don’t know what features are intended on being added, or what direction BBpress is going to go in. These aren’t bugs, we can’t add them to Trac, but many good points have been raised on these forums in the past – and I don’t think it’s right of us to assume you missed them or have ignore them, simply because there’s no communication.

Last bug not least…

Any chance we could have a reigning in chat with some Moderators? It’s great that they give up their time to reply here, and help the community, but (and I don’t know if it’s just someone having a bad day) the comments are getting way more aggressive/argumentative/absolutist.

It’s not that the standard answers aren’t wearing thin ofc, it’s just that we know the answer is going to be:

• It’s free.
• Sam’s too busy to pass on info.
• Blame Matt.
• It’s free.
• Stop asking. It’ll be ready when it’s ready.
• It’s free.
• Automattic are here to save us all and do not make any moey at all ever and everyone works for free I loves them – please ignore the $29 million they got which included the development of BBpress in the pitch.
• Go to trac.
• Don’t believe Trac.
• Sam’s too busy to keep you lot updated.
• Microsoft.
• It’s free.

That’s said a little tongue in cheek, and I hope it caused no offence, but while the moderators are clearly trying to do a great job (and we thank them), rarely do we get answers or constructive conversation when we talk about things like this. We’re shot down very quickly that we dared to have a different view point, and then given one of the standard answers that blame someone else or that it’s free.

WE WANT TO HELP.

Anyone who takes the time to hang around this forum sees we want to help. Anyone who takes the time to write on the forum wants to support BBpress.

If you’re the only developer on BBpress, or the person making almost all of the plugins, or the moderator who slams anyone who asks a question: please let us help.

We can’t just rock up, roll up our sleeves and stick our hand up a cow’s butt (an old farming joke – sorry). We need some direction, we need to be able to ask questions, we need information. Once we know what stage BBpress is at, we can help in taking it forward – with you.

But right now, all we can do is right posts like these every 2 months.