[fel64]

I’m not sure what’s going on but it’s probably a bug. It’ll be best if you report exactly what you did on https://trac.bbpress.org/.

[_ck_]

In plain english it essentially replaces the need for things like “Sticky:” to be hard coded into templates. Long overdue but at least it got put in there finally.

However when making templates for backwards compatibility, you’d have to detect if that function exists before relying on it.

The only themes I’ve seen that uses it already outside of the built-in default is “K2 for bbPress” (and now my “FutureKind”).

It allows tricks like I’ve done to replace “sticky” with a post-it-note-like yellow rectangle. But it also could be filtered via plugin to change it to a little graphic icon, etc. which was impossible before the function existed.

[lookfab]

Thanks very much for the kind words.

WordPressl, I mock up a few different design options in PhotoShop and when I’m happy there I move to the code. Since this was my first exposure to bbpress I ended up iterating between PS and the code a lot as I got to understand bbpress better. The challenge was to keep the flavor of the blog, but still make it clear to the user that they are somewhere different.

The mechanics of the template are similar to the default theme. The different look is achieved mostly through the CSS stylesheet. One major change to the layout is to add a floating div for the sidebar on the left. All the rollovers are CSS. I do the tabs simply in php by checking which forum the user is in and displaying the tab bar appropriately. Most of the other changes are actually about hiding some of the power of bbpress.

I’m glad the “tabs” resonate. I had a full working site in beta without them, but just wasn’t happy. The breadcrumb is a little subtle (particularly for folks who are new to a forum), and with only 4 forums and no sub-forums seems like overkill. But without the breadcrumb the user is lost once they’re in one of the forums or topics. The tab solves that and makes it easy to get to any forum from almost everywhere.

[trex33]

One of the best WP + bbPress designs I have seen outside of 9rules. Excellent Lookfab!

[wordpressbob]

I second that design. I think it looks awesome and I would’ve never thought it was bbpress, but a custom design.

Do you have any tips on how you came about redesigning the template?

Thanks!

[Olaf Lederer]

this what I did, I can’t see something related to the bbpress main files.

Actually the value of the function is empty..

[_ck_]

Okay I have created a new plugin “Human Test” which will do some tests during registration to try to slow down the bots.

Eventually will do more tricky things like captcha and variable math but for version 0.01 it simply asks what the answer to 2+2 is.

I need to know if this still works with older versions and weird themes:

http://ckon.wordpress.com/files/2008/01/human-test.txt

Awaiting inclusion in the bbPress plugin depository for newer versions.

[_ck_]

I just noticed that over the past few months there are at least 50 fake signups on bbShowcase (out of 250).

Has anyone made a captcha or turing test plugin for the bbPress signup yet? I can’t seem to find one.

[_ck_]

Thanks for the background Sam. For a moment I panicked about the cookie hash vulnerability as I have legacy WP 2.1 (and bbpress 0.81) installs that are too customized to upgrade (I hack security fixes in manually) but then I read this:

*If* an attacker can gain read access to the wp_user table, for example due to a publicly visible backup or SQL injection vulnerability, a valid cookie can be generated for any account.

You’ve got bigger problems if an attacker can do a SQL injection or has access to your mysql backup. But I can definitely understand why they replaced it. Who the heck figures these vulnerabilities out though, wow.

Since bbShowcase is stand alone bbPress (for now) I’ll give the upgrade another shot later and try to understand what’s going on with the cookies/login.

I take it that 0.8.3.1 doesn’t use the new cookies though? At some point you might need to release 1075 as 0.8.3.5 or something like that?

[Sam Bauers]

@ fel64

BackPress is already a separate repository which is linked to externally within the bbPress trunk.

For interests sake the BackPress repository is here:

http://svn.automattic.com/backpress

BackPress has no separate Trac though.

[Sam Bauers]

@ _ck_

I suggest you try a new test install of both bbPress and WordPress integrated to see the way the auth and secrets are supposed to match up in a “clean” environment. You should be able to adjust things in your existing installation as a result.

[fel64]

The best way to find out is to look in the files really.

https://trac.bbpress.org/browser/trunk/bb-includes/template-functions.php?rev=1076#L758

[fel64]

XML-RPC sounds fairly interesting; I’d like to see what you’ll do with it apart from pingbacks. Content aggregation sounds good too. Is there anything you can say about backPress, though? Do you have any idea for when you’ll maybe be splitting it into BackPress and bbPress?

(why does dev use a 1990’s-style mailing list for it’s own *forum* software?)

Because while forum software is a communication medium it’s not necessarily the right one for development talk. But you’ve brought it up many times now; maybe time to give it a rest?

[chrishajer]

Sam, I think this should be made sticky. For a while, the conventional wisdom was to tell people to grab the latest trunk to fix the underscore plugin issue and the mysqli issue, but that’s no longer true. There is no good reason for a non-developer to use trunk at this point, I don’t think. Is the best advice for people who just want to install a working version of bbPress to use r980, as you posted about a month ago, or has that advice changed?

Thanks,

Chris

[chrishajer]

I don’t think the trunk release is reliable for installations at this point.

Changeset 1076 (aka “this will break everything”)

You should probably install an .8.3.1 release or possibly a revision after .8.3.1 but not the latest trunk. There was a post from sambauers regarding which revision would be best to check out, I think it was revision r980.

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/broken-profiles-for-users-with-spaces-in-the-names?replies=5#post-12769

[_ck_]

Ugh, so an existing forum with 1000 users will have to instruct every single one to clear their cookies – meaning at least 50% won’t understand and try to contact the forum operator personally.

I think there is a better way – perhaps an upgrade plugin that can detect the out of date hash and instruct the client to delete the old cookie and redirect back to the login.

Actually, wouldn’t bbpress replace the hash data in the cookie upon login? None of this sounds right – I created a new user under 1075 and was still unable to login.

I’ve gotten build 1006 to work properly so I guess I will try another investigation into the upgrade from there tonight. I wonder if this has to do with the hard coded hash I have set in bb-config.php

How does this affect a setup with a shared login from wordpress where you have to match the same hash it has? I had the integration working just right, hope there was a good reason to fiddle with it.

[_ck_]

Installed on bbShowcase as a demo:

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/?bbtheme=MistyMorning-bbpress

However you need to test+fix it in Firefox.

While it looks okay in IE, there’s a float/clear problem in Firefox and Opera.

There’s also a overflow/width issue in Safari that I can’t quickly identify.

[Sam Bauers]

You know that both cookie and password hashing have changed? You may need to clear your old cookies manually to make way for the new ones. Send a mail to the dev list or hit us on IRC in the #bbpress channel and well work out what’s going on.

We’re acutely aware of how spammers attempt to “fool” Akismet. There are steps being taken now to help improve the processes involved in combatting this. Remember that we are users of Akismet too, so have an interest in keeping it ahead of the game.

The nature of Akismet’s purpose means that back-end code needs to remain closed. If spammers knew how it worked, it would likely make it possible for them to game the system. Of course it is opt-in, so if you don’t like it then you don’t have to use it. Controlling the data that is passed to Akismet is controllable from the client end using plugins that can limit it’s behaviour. These already exist for WordPress, bbPress ones could be easily developed too. If there are hooks missing to make that possible then we’ll add them.

[_ck_]

I’ll probably be forced to join the dev list to try to solve this but I just tried moving from 951 to 1075 and I cannot get the logins to “stick” (ie. logs in and then acts as if it is not logged in)

Seems like the old cookie path issue but I’ve looked the cookies and the code and everything seems healthy. Even created a new user with 1075 and that user cannot login either.

eta: 1006 does not exhibit the login issue

ps. don’t kid yourself with Akismet stopping spam. Spammers just escalate their deviousness on what they can get through it. My wordpress.com blog gets spam almost daily now, bleeding right through Akismet. And Akismet hasn’t been given peer-review for privacy/security issues such as passing every single message entered on every single blog and bbpress through automattic – even for private posts and private sub-forums. Won’t make for good headlines when people start to think about it.

[_ck_]

Thanks for taking the time to write that up.

I guess my biggest question for now is if build 1075 should be treated as the most relatively stable build for alpha users.

I’ll say this to the day I abandon bbpress – adding trackbacks/pingbacks to it is the biggest waste of limited time and resources and will make the program the spammers target of choice while leaving it with the worst reputation.

ps. if Matt held some kind of contest I am sure a better name could be come up with than “TalkPress”. The problem is he wants to stick to that “press” suffix which implies a one-way communication for a something that is specifically for two-way interaction.

[Sam Bauers]

Things may be a bit confusing at the moment with two new and different names flying around. I’ll do my best to clarify things and we can use this topic for everyone to ask questions on the subject and provide input.

For those who are interested, the first thing to do is read this post (and the articles it links to) in the blog:

The future for bbPress

That post is pretty vague about things. So let me be more specific here. First, I’d like to make it clear that bbPress is not being replaced or abandoned or drastically changing direction. As for the two new names that have been mentioned, I’ll cover them below.

BackPress:

bbPress has a lot of shared code with WordPress. BackPress is the name of a new project which is attempting to normalise this shared code into a set of generic files that will simply plug in to both projects (and potentially others). This allows us to leverage the testing and improvements made to this shared code without the overheads of manually merging changes. This way we can spend more time on bbPress’ unique code and extending new functionality.

TalkPress:

It has been public for a while that Automattic intends to create a hosted forums service based on the bbPress project code. The intention is to make this work much like the existing WordPress.com hosted service for blogs. Matt Mullenweg let it slip that the working name for the project (and not necessarily the service) is TalkPress. We probably won’t talk much about it here, but I can say that the majority of the code written to create this new project will be released as open source. Regardless of the name of that service when it launches, the name of this project, “bbPress”, will not change.

As for the upcoming work for bbPress, I’m happy to elabrorate here:

bbPress code:

Along with the inclusion of BackPress into trunk, there are other things going on. We are in the process of implementing a new taxonomy structure for tags. Improving bbPress’ object cache to make it compatible with various WordPress object cache plugins. Replacing the fairly ordinary “favourites” system with a much more flexible and useful topic aggregation tool, and later on we will be incorporating a set of functionality based around the XML-RPC tools available in WordPress such as pingbacks and trackbacks.

bbPress.org website

The bbPress.org website is due for a clean up. Most importantly, the extend area will be upgraded to include a plugin repository similar in functionality to the one that exists on the WordPress.org website. There is a possibility that we will also launch a theme repository based on the same system. A little later on, we plan to re-design the whole site.

I hope this clears things up a little and I’m happy to answer any questions here. I can’t think of anything, but it’s possible that there may be some things that I can’t say about the hosted service project. Feel free to ask though.

[Tymothi]

I am getting this error

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/content/h/e/r/heroalliance/html/bbpress/config.php:64) in /home/content/h/e/r/heroalliance/html/bbpress/bb-includes/pluggable.php on line 164

I am using PHP5

[Sam Bauers]

We can continue this conversation over here:

TalkPress

Closing this topic.

[Sam Bauers]

Repost from the dev mailing list:

As of the last commit at this time (revision 1076), trunk is in an experimental and unreliable state. We are attempting to abstract some functions and classes for easier sharing of code between WordPress and bbPress. This shared code is called “BackPress”, and we’ll probably be mentioning it a few times here and there in Trac and other dev discussions.

[Andrew]

I’m hoping this is straightforward. I’ve integrated BBpress and WordPress at a theme level – ie reusing header and footer. What I would like to do is display different information (such as a link to a user profile) in the header only when a bbpress page is being displayed. Is there a conditional variable I can check with php that would allow me to do this? Which global variable? Thanks.