Too bad Google also has it’s own API and doesn’t do openid (yet?)
But in theory bbpress could be made to use google identities… interesting….
http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/Authentication.html
We are in perfect sync on that one… having xml-rpc pingbacks in a forum is the most worthless feature idea to ever be thought of. I’ve completely disabled them on wordpress because I don’t think they provide any true value to the reader, and most of them are spam anyway. I’ve written my own simple spam plugin to run in conjunction with Akismet because I was unsatisfied with what I was getting.
Your idea of the wordpress logins would work if they implemented OpenID in bbPress and had wordpress.com as an openid server. Would actually be a killer feature, I’d think.
I’ve hacked up my wp-cache2 to allow for more dynamic code to be called on each post. Most of my content is really very static, so I don’t need it to be updated often.
I’ve never had any issues with it caching the wrong versions though.
Oh I didn’t realize xcache is just an opcode cache. I already use eaccelerator which seems to have zero quirks compared to other solutions. But yeah, any opcode cache for wordpress/bbpress is a must for any active site.
I already create the sidebar statically across my sites, saves a lot of work and repetition on the db.
the wp-cache “plugin” has flaws in it’s logic. I noticed that unregistered visitors were getting edit links on posts, not good, even if they couldn’t actually edit. Then it has an exclude feature to keep certain parts dynamic, but you can’t have wordpress calls in those dynamic parts because wordpress isn’t actually loaded, which is the whole point. so it won’t work and gives error (#1 confusion to most people trying to use it)
In the end, I hacked wp-cache to only cache the RSS feeds which were causing the most requests, yet the most static of all the content. Caching rss feeds on bbpress should be an easy, useful thing too, but then on a forum I highly doubt the use of rss feeds on anything but the latest discussions.
What really worries me about the 0.84 release is the xml-rpc pingbacks. bbpress is going to become known as the spammers forum of choice with a bad rep, until novices are given an easy option to turn it off, or better yet it’s off by default. I cannot disagree more highly with the entire feature idea. It defeats the entire purpose of a forum. What they are trying to do is have a universal way to cross post across forums but the whole point of a forum is *community* and getting people to actually visit, not stay away.
What they really should do instead of pingbacks if they want easy cross communication, is have a universal login based on a database at wordpress.com – Basically anyone with a wordpress account could visit your wordpress or bbpress site and instantly post if they wanted as “wp.membername” without having to register again and again. Sure there are security issues to be tackled but it’s better than anonymous spam heaven on pingbacks. Akismet won’t protect pingbacks, I see spam in my wordpress.com account every week.
> I have to eventually code it to store the country data in the usermeta. But there’s the issue that their IP/location can change on a per-post basis
An upcoming feature is post tagging, you’ll be able to store this data in an “invisible” post tag I believe.
Downloadable ZIP of latest trunk is via a link at the bottom of that page.
The trunk is pretty stable actually, and is more bug free than the latest release usually.
You are better off setting up a subversion client and “checking out” a copy of the code. You can then keep up-to-date on changes in the core with the click of a button.
Search the forum for info on using SVN to checkout a copy.
A lot has changed, the best thing to do is to trawl through the changelog on the Trac site. Only a couple of things have changed dramatically, how views works is one.
BB_Query is in the latest trunk in bb-includes/classes.php
How do you handle caching a page with items only a moderator should see, and then pages that are okay for subscribers, and then pages that are for open public? The cache will have to be rather smart. And then you can’t show any personal information on the page like the user’s name if it’s going to be cached.
bbpress still has some non-optimised routines that don’t use the soft cache, for example on the topic page, I’ve noticed it does a query at the end to fetch all the forums names for the moderator “move this topic” tool. Those should definitely be in the cache but it’s not used.
For a logged out user, I have my topic pages down to 15 queries. That’s the most “expensive page”. It uses 3 more queries for a logged in user (one of them listed above).
But I’ve got this geoip flag function that I wrote to show country flags and unfortunately it’s very “expensive” and adds an extra query for every unique poster on the topic page. There’s no way to stack requests since it must search by range (researched it like crazy but no solutions). I have to eventually code it to store the country data in the usermeta. But there’s the issue that their IP/location can change on a per-post basis and that sometimes I have to patch the geo information because the db gets it wrong. Oh well.
Thanks, Sam.
I’m not sure whether to even touch your last suggestion, about using the latest trunk rather than the latest release. I see the trunk code browser at https://trac.bbpress.org/browser/trunk but I don’t know where to find it as one downloadable archive. And surely the trunk has new bugs and unfinished features, which is why it hasn’t been turned into a new release, right?
Can you give us any hints about what has changed that plugin writers need to know about?
P.S. Where do I find BB_Query?
There are lots of built-in functions for querying the topic meta, they are all in the same place in the code, so searching in the code for the functions I mentioned above will reveal them all.
Joining tables to create one query is better than using two queries to retrieve the same data. The new BB_Query class could easily handle the query you wrote up there.
By the way, I suggest you build your plugin against the latest trunk rather than the latest release.
I’m probably going to have to create a bunch of new plugins over the next month… of course I’ll post them here for everybody to share 
I suppose I should write a plugin for it then.
I’d certainly welcome it!
How about “locking” a forum so that only admin/mods can create topics in it and members can ONLY reply on these topics? (so not create them)
So making a forum half-private
What? do_action syntax is like this:
do_action( $tag, $function_name [, $priority] );
$latlong is the value, in this case latitude/longitude.
I have that TortoiseSVN installed, still need to figure out how to let this update the trac aswell
Hmm also don’t forget the do action at the end of the function:
do_action('bb_function_name', $topic_id, 'topic_geolocation');
I also have a question about this:
// To add
bb_update_topicmeta($topic_id, 'topic_geolocation', $latlong);
What does/should $latlong do/be used for?
Greetz
There is soft user/topic caching, but there’s no hard caching yet. If you look at the code, in cache.php, you’ll see that it’s written to enable file-based caching in bb-cache/, but doesn’t seem to do so at the moment. It probably will in future I guess? If you fiddle you could probably turn it on. mdawaffe is now working on xml-rpc when he’s working on bb at all, so it’s not the next feature at least. I also think he was planning something else for .8.4.
Testing this tomorrow after work…. nah after diner after work
Thx for the help mate!
_Null
ps. how to open a .diff?? (windows machine)
Testing this tomorrow after work…. nah after diner after work
Thx for the help mate!
_Null
MMember
The new changes have been made:
http://www.box.net/shared/cgrj1na0t7
I think that should cover the problems. I took the liberty of changing other things as well… hope you don’t mind. I removed some redundancies in the CSS, and changed some little code things.
There’s the modified bbmenu.php file, as well as the diff file to make it a little easier for you to see what I changed. If you cant make sense of the diff there are diff file viewers that color the text and make it more human-readable.
so1o,
I have been looking for something similar to the ChipIn gadget… I am so happy that I found your page just for that
Very nice theme also.
bbpress uses so few queries that caching has got to be a low priority, especially when the point of a forum is to have very dynamic updates customised for the logged in member – it’s very different than a wordpress environment
as long as you have the mysql cache turned on, it should be very responsive – just look at the main wordpress support forum – eaccelerator would take care of caching the php opcode and that can’t be too far behind a static page
the bonus is that on an active forum, everything will be very dynamic as it happens…
Looking in the code, I see a lot of references to object caching, but I don’t think it’s actually used anywhere.
Does anybody know the state of the caching system, or what the problems were that required disabling it? Will it ever be enabled again?
And yes, I already posted to the mailing list quite a while ago and got nothing.
Cool, this is exactly the kind of bbPress-specific best practices I need to know and am not going to get from “PHP and MySQL in 30 Minutes”!
Is topicmeta documented anywhere? I’m looking at the code and can’t say it’s entirely clear…
Turn the time-string into a timestamp to be turned into a time-string.
<?php echo date( 'g:i A', strtotime( $latestpost->post_time ) ); ?>
There’s a template function that gives you the link to the latest post in the topic. I believe it’s called get_topic_last_post_link() but I’m not sure.
