Hi Ipstenu,
I’m going to disagree with you a little mate, and try not to take it off topic too much.
Yes, each adjective is subjective to ones perspective. “easy” and “alot” etc. can mean different things to different people. That said, lets look at them a sec.
“extensive plugins?”
There are just under 120 plugins for BBPress.
Over 1/3rd haven’t been updated in a year. I’d wager a good few of them don’t work anymore.
And the ones with latest comments 6-12 months ago, usually don’t work either.
Also from what i’ve seen about 1/4 of them are redundant or useless in 0.9 / 1.0alpha.
So we’re looking at maybe 40-50 plugins.
Does anyone think that’s “extensive”?
I know it’s subjective, but, um, well you can make up your own mind.
“You CAN redesign the hell out of a bbPress site”
To a certain extent i’ll agree and disagree with it. To redesign a bbpress forum so that it doesn’t look like this theme actually takes a bucket load of work. I’ve done it for 3 websites, and every time it’s involved me writing full on plugins just to output the right code, or W3C acceptable code, or overwrite the damned code thats stored outwith the templates (why is that btw?).
Can i stop and ask that? WHY does a theme designer NEED to write alot of non basic php code as a separate to their theme plugin, just to over write HARDCODED design output? Since when was hardcoding design output into the core of a theme-able piece of software a good idea?
What you can’t do with bbpress, is hand a Designer/ HTML coder your template files and expect to get anything back that’s not a flat output of a table. It’s a point I raised a while ago (and i’ll not bang on about it) but BBpress works at doing one thing. Outputting a flat list from a database.
In terms of your all forums kinda look the same , i have to agree in this instance. Most forums, ipb/vBulletin/phpBB etc do all look the same. but guess what. bbpress doesn’t look much like them. I’ve stated before BBpress’s horrific handling of parent/children with categories etc. is bloody woeful; but if you’re talking about usability, then bbpress starts to fall down a little.
What it outputs is simple, yes, to the user, but it’s not very perceptive. Finding a specific post or vital information (say that 0.9 = WP2.5 – you know , something you’d expect to be on the documentation or download page but is actually on page 3 of a topic started 1 year ago) , is a disaster. It’s reliant on the user
who posted the content using TAGS appropriotely and ofc it requires a better search function.
Lets not forget that ‘tags’ are fairly new, and really only web savvy people use/know about them. A huge chunk of this software’s cross-pollination and iteration is taken out of the developers hands and placed smack bang in teh hand of the end user (whom we know nothing about nor can reply on).
Just because something is simple/plain, does not make it inherently usable.
Think Boo.com.
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Anyway, there are a number of things we’d all like to see fixed in bbpress. Some more vital than others. we’ll all agree and disagree on many, but my over riding feeling is this:
Our Clients, customers, friends, colleagues, schools, own sites, will at some stage like to, nah need to, be updated to the latest version of WordPress. it will vary from person to person, but at some stage you know that a wordpress upgrade is probably in the pipes.
But if you’re using BBpress, then you’ve been forced to hold off upgrading for over half a year. We will be/are a whole version behind, and surely someone can see that it’s got to be an issue.
I suppose what i dont understand is, and maybe i’m the only one, so please 100% feel free to explain it to me like an idiot.
if The most requested topic on this website is “wordpress integration”, and the singular fail point of the software is “wordpress integration”, and teh company that owns this software also own wordpress, and it happens to be your singular initial selling point of the software, um, well, WHY THE HELL HAS IT NOT BEEN THE ONLY PRIORITY AND FIXED IN THE 3 MONTHS SINCE 1.0ALPHA CAME OUT?
We’ve had other fixes, new code, new features, a facebook page (see i hadn’t forgotten), but yet without even a hint of when this base level feature might appear, we’re told it’s a moving target.
Please, explain it to me like a 5 year old, that hasn’t read the blog posts linking to the $29 million dollars investment, that also lead to Sam being taken on as a full time developer on bbpress (i.e. dont say no time/resources).
