[Michael]

That should do okay – if it works and doesn’t reduce server-load times, then it should work.

[Elias]

The one thing I love on bbPress

The one thing I love on bbPress is: It is simple and fast. “Simple” means, its functionality is easy to understand and to use for a less experienced internet user and there are no features distracting from the one core thing in a forum, from that funny discussion thing. And “Fast” means, that the bbPress core is even faster than the rather minimalist PunBB on the virtual server I use bbPress on. These are the two “features” of bbPress I really want to see in the future.

The things I hate on WordPress

Following the current discussion reminds me on my own experience with the great WordPress blog software. I am a WordPress user since WP 1.5.x, and WP 1.5.x was the software making me a blogger. It was easy to use, had a clean and simple user interface for the blogger, could be extended easily and replaces my simple home-written system after one week of testing and comparing to s9y.

Now, I do hate my long ago decision for WP sometimes. The current WP version 2.8.x is bloated, slow and without a good caching plugin not well-suited for a blog with readers.

As an example, there is a tiny german blog filled by me and less frequent some other people. It is called “Blah”, and most of its postings are simply links to other internet resources, mostly political, conspirational and funny ones. Did I mention that the blog is called “Blah”? It is not really a “successful” one, in the last six months there were approximately 2,000 visits per day, that’s not much. The “average visitor” requests five postings, and only one percent of them ever leaves a comment. The blog’s database contains 4,300 posts at the moment, that’s not much too. If I deactivate the WP Super Cache plugin, the server fails to handle that little load, the response time of the tiny blog grow to 30 to 50 seconds, the apache processes accumulates and finally the server runs out of virtual memory, giving visitors that funny “Out of memory” PHP error messages or a plain white page.

This is a situation totally unwanted for a bulletin board, which is a highly dynamic kind of website that can not be cached as easy as the less frequent views of a blog.

From bbPress 0.9.x to 1.0.x, the number of database queries to view the same page has nearly doubled, and the execution time has grown by approximately 60 percent on the same server. From the user point’s of view, it was exactly the same page, and bbPress is at the moment still performant enough to be better than any other bulletin board software. But from my point of view it remembers me to the things I experienced again and again with many new WordPress versions in the past, reaching the current point of a blog, which isn’t made to have more than a handful of readers. But for a WP blog, I can work around with WP Super Cache, for forums this approach is nearly impossible.

Some words about readers

I’m looking at the statistics generated from the apache logfiles of the Blah-blog for the last six months. It is a blog in german language, and of course most readers are living in Germany, less in Austria or Suisse, some in the Netherlands, Danmark, Belgium, Poland, Russia or Hungary too. These are not readers from the so called “third world”. (There is only one world, and we all have to share it!) In the last six months, 19 percent of the Blah-blog readers used an old dial-up modem connection to access it. (Identified by the rather speaking hostnames given in germany for that kind of connection I can identify, there may be some more readers with a low-bandwidth connection.) For this fifth part of my readers (which may be a representative value for other websites in germany too, but most people seems not interested in this kind of information), every use of large JavaScript magic which has to be loaded via a low-bandwidth connection gives an impression of slowness, and this is something I do not want to give them. That’s a reason for the rather minimalistic design of this blog.

Let me compare that 19 percent to another statistical number for the Blah-blog. 12 percent of all readers uses that fu… fine Internet Explorer 6.0 for surfing. (Identified by the user-agent string, which may be faked in rare cases.) The IE 6 is an old and ugly browser with many problems and a CSS box model interpretation giving a good headache to designers, and there are much better browsers out for free. But in many cases it is unwanted to exclude that 12 percent of website users or to give them a totally trashed design experience. It is also amazing, how many people are still using Windows 98 or ME or even Windows NT 4.0. I assume these people use rather old computers, still working for their personal requirements, so they don’t want to throw them to waste. Yes, there are people out there, which are poor and simply cannot spend a few hundred euros for new hardware every few years — me too. These are people I don’t want to exclude from any website I maintain, and especially I don’t want to exclude these from pages about political or cultural subjects. Every kind of bloat is wrong in my point of view.

(I use bbPress for a small forum on an uncommercial artists’ webpage, and it is great for that. This usage is my reason why I’m maintaining an inofficial german translation of bbPress, there is simply no language file for German at the moment, and not to share this work is stupid.)

Some words about the dashboard

The current bbPress dashboard is fine, it is aesthetical appealing, easy to use (compared to other bulletin boards’ backends) and fast even via a low-bandwidth connection and on a not up-to-date computer. It can be used with all browsers, and it makes all administrative tasks easy. The current WordPress dashboard sucks. It is unuseable slow with the Opera browser, and even with other browsers needs an enourmeous transfer of data and an long initialization time before one can do that simple thing which is blogging: writing a new post. If someone uses an older computer (older than five years), it is unuseable with any browser, and it is unbelievable frustrating to use via a dialup connection. And no, that “Google Gears” stuff does not help.) The huge amount of features are overwhelming for an unexperienced user, and for the little artists’ site (with eight authors) I still have to help some people for every post they want to blog. Since I had to upgrade that site to WP 2.8.x (it used 2.0.x and 2.3.x for a long time), the other authors hate me. Some of them are poor people. I recommend the usage of BlogDesk for them, but sometimes there are tasks which cannot be done with BlogDesk, as deleting an unwanted idiot’s comment or declaring a post as sticky (to announce an action, happening, exhibition, sound vernissage, reading, party, etc.). Since WP 2.8.x, the posting frequency of some co-authors is reduced to zero, and if I had the possibility for it, I would create my own WordPress fork (a DietPress for people who wants blogging without bloat).

And this is the way bbPress should avoid, in my opinion.

The bbPress of the future I want

bbPress is great! The bbPress core is good, and the features in an out-of-the-box installation are enough in many cases. But of course, there are things that could be improved, and there are many features often missed by people who wants a bulletin board. The probaly most wanted features are (list may be incomplete)

• eMail notification for new posts
• A kind of bbCode, which meets better the standard people expect in a BB software
• An improved editor, helping the user to do the wanted markup (may be bloaty magic WYSIWYG, but even eight buttons with a little JavaScript are better than nothing for the inexperienced user)
• An internal system of personal messaging (I hate it, but others love it)
• Attachment of files to a post
• Perhaps an avatar system independent from Gravatar
• An easy to extend user profile with additional informations
• A “who is online now” display
• Counters how often a post has been read
• A “terms of usage” statement which is required to be accepted by newly registered users
• An extended search with criteria as forum, tag, date range, username. (The existing search is better than the WordPress search, but I can still be improved. In a support forum with ten thousands of topics, it would be good to have the accumulated information more “findable”.)
• An interactive (and plugin-extensible and i18nable) help system for all core bbPress features, explaining the bbPress usage to inexperienced users and the concepts they cannot understand directly, especially tags. This is something I haven’t seen in any other BB software, but it is something really needed. It may even contain some words about netiquette…
• Perhaps a “widget system” similar to WP as a simple way to modify the order of appearance of the displayed entities without editing in themes

And of course, bbPress must remain performant, non-bloated and easy to integrate with WordPress. That’s a lot…

Many of these frequently requested features are not a good “standard” functionablity.

• The eMail notification is fine for spammers too. I am registered in some boards with this “feature”, and from time to time someone registers, writes spammy posts to various topics and the BB software dutifully and reliable sends that spam to a lot of users, before a moderator can do something. That’s why I am deactivating it always — one day, I received more than 100 mails “from my favorite forum”… aaargh!
• An over-improved editor slows down the forum for people with old hardware and makes the forum unusable for blind people with their strange solutions for surfing. (Yes, some of my “readers” are blind.)
• Personal massaging is a poor reinvention of good old internet eMail that sucks. For someone active on various boards, he has to check it messages in many places, which is ugly.
• An extended user profile is exactly the thing spammers want. The links in approximately 5 percent of my eMail spam are going to user profiles in bulletin boards, which are misused in many ways.
• Every upload possibility to the server can be a security problem, can be used by spammers to put spammy graphics in the internet or can consume execessive hard disc space on the server if heavily used.

But of course these features are wanted in many cases.

We should have a bbPress slogan for all future development. My suggestion is: Let’s make simple things easy, and let’s make complex things possible.

Learning from that part of WordPress which sucks means: Doing it better in bbPress. The core system should kept as a small one, perhaps a little smaller than the actual core. (The current user profile is sometimes unwanted.) And all additional features should be implemented in plugins, that a forum administrator can activate and configure as needed.

Core Plugins

But plugins are a huge problem too. Using a plugin indenpendent from the core system means: Making the update of bbPress to a new version sometimes to a migraine upgrade, whenever the needed plugins do not work with the newer version. Sometimes, I have this problem with one of my sites based on WordPress. And if the plugin’s functionality does require editing in the themes, it excludes less-experienced forum-administrators with a lack of PHP knowledge from using the plugins, which is not exactly the way to make complex things possible.

So there should be a set of plugins which are part of the bbPress release, which are developed together with the core system, let’s call them “core plugins”. It is not required to activate them to have a simple and basic bulletin board, but if someone do so, he will never have problems with upgrades. The “core plugins” are guaranteed to be delivered and to work with every release version and every security fix ever released. We have this kind of “core plugins” already, bozo users and Akismet. But it is a concept to be extended. A better post editor, a “terms of usage” page, a PM system, an internal avatar system, attachments to posts and all the administrative stuff around these features are good candidates for “core plugins”. If someone does not need them, he does not activated them. But if someone activates them and only them, this will never make the next bbPress release to a upgrade hell.

There may be bbPress-tags which are implemented empty if a core plugin isn’t activated, to make it easy to program the default theme and any other theme independent from the activated set of “core plugins” and without that sucking lines of if (function_exists ('bb_great_feature')) bb_great_feature ();. This kind of interface can be defined long before the “core plugins” are stable, and it can be documented for theme developers to allow them making their themes future-proof. (Oh yes, we need some good themes, the default one is fine, but some people want a richer selection.)

The bbPress features eighty percent of people want can be implemented in “core plugins”. Simple things will be easy. And if someone wants a small bbPress, that’s easier, he simply does not need to activate any “core plugin”. And there is still a plugin interface which makes complex things possible — sometimes a little editing in themes is required, but most people never needs to do so.

That’s the way bbPress should go, in my opinion.

(It may be a way for the future of WordPress too. But that’s not the topic here, and the WP developers do their work for a huge community of users and simply cannot change earlier decisions easily.)

And excuse my english. My poetic german is much better… and shorter.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Wow, for some reason half of my post doesnt’ appear until i’m logged in. That can’t be good…

@grassrootsspa

Bloat of the code isn’t the Physical Size mate, its how well written the code is, how processor intensive it is, and how many Database queries it needs etc etc.

v1.0.2 with 0 plugins is about 150% more processor intensive than v0.9 with all my plugins running. On small sites it makes very little difference, on large sites it makes a heck of a difference.

The two websites i’ve upgraded to v1.0.2, simply did to having to upgrade WP on them, are far more processor intensive than all my other sites. Faaaar more. _CK_ had some really good stats on this before she left, which we now dont have access to, so i apologise for my annacdotal evidence.

My point was, not to nit-pick over your statement or get into a discussion about which specific features YOU and I want in the core (because that would vary from everyone else here), but merely to come to some form of concensus about how we should talk about what we all think BBpress needs.

I say this because, since BBprogress closed and i’ve tried to be more involved with the BBpress site again, i notice that people mix up Feature requests quite a bit. If i can again take your post:

“…private messaging, TinyMCE/rich text, topic views, Allow Images, Smilies, User Directory, Members Online, Related Topics, Reputation, Top Posters…”

Topic Views is a great example of something that is pretty bog standard in terms of user’s experience of forum software. X thread was viewed Y times and replied to Z times. Without adding much/any bloat to the forum software, you’re adding a feature any user from ages 1 to 100 could use without requiring interactivity.

Private messaging, Reputations, Rich Text Editors etc all work on the presumption that the average/most users want that. Experience tells us otherwise.

“Let’s make bbPress more robust in features so it blows vBulletin out of the water”.

I’m not sure why anyone else came to BBpress, so i dont want to presume. But there seems to be 2 camps, those that wanted totally customizable well written code with hooks in a way we were used to and those that came to BBpress because WP is awesome and easy to configure/download themes for and they wanted to create something as good as vBulletin but easier to control.

I’m quietly confident people in camp 1 are not fussed in the slightest about blowing “vBulletin out of the water”, because if it did, then i’d just have something along the same lines as vBulletin. Not wanting that is the reason i joine dup here in the first place, again thats just me.

People in camp 2, have a tendancy to want core Features to be things (while useful) that aren’t neccessary for forum software to fulfill its duty in the most efficient manner.

There’s nothing wrong with either opinion, but taking the fight to other forum software via cool features that on the whole are rarely used by the end user, is not in anyway the focus of BBpress.

@johnhiler

It is good to see an old voice

You’re ofc right about fixing this website (in the first instance to remove all the wrong information), and the plugin section, but i’m going to say that documentation on functions is not something i’m too fussed about right now.

I think you’re right that, even with Matt taking over BBpress, we wont have a new release anytime soon, and as such this is BBpress’ most stable time in years to design theme’s and plugins. And yet, thats not happening.

With Sam’s moving on, and then then _ck_’s moving on, the project appeared (emphasis on appeared) to be shelved or forgotten about. Development has slowed to a crawl, and many sites that use BBpress are still choosing to use 0.9 (I know that both you and I are for the most part).

The realism is that 1.0.2 wasn’t seen to be a full on stable release by many, rather a rushed stop gap. This wasn’t helped at the time by _ck_’s negative comments about it (which i agreed with both at the time and now). It was largely rewritten between the 2nd and 3rd alpha, and beta testing was scrapped before it was released to us. 2 small bug fix released 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 and c.15 days later the main/only developer leaves town without saying anything. *tumbleweed*

Whatever Matt and the team do, it’ll need some serious project management, and some serious PR to get people beliving in the project again. Looks to me like he’s started both, which is wonderful, but i still doubt that many people will be up for documenting a version of BBpress that is likely to be replaced realtively soon – especially given how few plugin or theme developers there are for BBpress, and the sheer drop in numbers in comparison to how many there were a year ago.

Good night all and take care.

[johnhiler]

@grassrootsspa – The size of the code isn’t necessarily the key factor in bloat. A tiny but poorly coded feature or plugin can put an immense load on the server! I think for most personal sites this isn’t a big factor, but scaling is a huge factor for some sites and I greatly appreciate having the choice to keep features out of my core engine.

In any case, history is on your side… Matt tends to move features from the plugin into the core (or just add them straight to the core). Sam was moving in that direction too – Voices went straight into the core without any discussion or debate, even though it could easily have been implemented as a plugin:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/topic-voices/

Overall what bbPress needs right now is not new features or a new release. It needs documentation of what we have, and a focus on building a developer/designer community. A themes directory would go a long way towards that. So would sprucing up the Extend/plugins tab not to be using the 0.8.x version of bbPress… which isn’t even signin integrated! And Stats have been “coming soon” for several years now:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-cumulus/stats/

Implementing this stuff (along with a site redesign) would also give the Automattic leadership time to get to know the bbPress community better, before any hasty design decisions are made.

[kevinjohngallagher]

It is, by about 50%.

That said, no version of BBpress is particularly heavy on the processor

[bb-lover]

Michael Finally i got it…..

I use the following code… and listen …. wow its works

<iframe src =”contact.php” width=”500″ height=”700″>

</iframe>

I Just want to confirm…..should i continue to use this script or quit…. is this good or bad for me……..Thx

[Fernando Tellado]

Very nice plugin and idea

Thanks a lot!

[adamcap]

nvm I’m cool now, all I had to do was disable then reenable permalinks

[fmimoso]

What’s the difference between this one and the older? Changelog?

My (fast) interpretation of this theme: http://forumemprego.net/ (a work/job discussion forum).

Thank you.

[noz]

Ok i found to change the encryting method.

In /bbpress/bb-includes/backpress/class.passwordhash.php :

function HashPassword($password) {

// Delete the previous code and put yours

}

[Michael]

Agreed – very nice.

I specifically chose a theme (and edited it deeply) because it was clean, new, and the buttons are easy to find.

See what I mean: http://www.inniosoft.co.cc/devstation

Great job refeuled!

[timskii]

You need to recognize that there are distinct groups of people with different answers. For example:

Plugin Programmers: Lack of stability of core behavior and data structure over the last year-or-so has become a real grind. A lot of 0.9 code partly stopped working in 1.0 – “partly” being particularly annoying, because those issues are harder to spot. For the rest of us, that grind means that plugins cannot be relied upon: There’s a risk of being unable to upgrade because a key plugin won’t work anymore. While you can argue “that’s inevitable”, if important features rely on plugins, a lot more care needs to be taken to ensure those plugins don’t break.

Server Administrators: One look at this forum tells you all you need to know. WordPress’s installation is accessible to people that know almost nothing about teh internet. In contrast, BBPress integration sucks: Manual, generally bewildering, and prone to unexplained failures. Worth adding here that there is a valid “no bloat please” option: BBPress is currently attractive precisely because it can deal with massive amounts of traffic. Not everyone wants to re-create the internet in one piece of software.

End Users: Joanna Average forum reader doesn’t care about any of that, and is probably keener on things like WYSYWYG, email, etc.

Obviously these groups influence one another, but it seems likely that this poll will be swamped by the desires of the Administrator group. Now, if nobody ever installs BBPress, nobody will get to use it or write plugins for it – so there’s no harm keeping the administrators happy. But don’t forget the other groups – they’re also important!

[af3]

oppss.. i think this works 9to show topis started by the user) to be shown in bp profile:

<h2>Latest Topics Started in Forum</h2>



<ul>

<?php

$query="SELECT * FROM bb_topics WHERE topic_status=0 AND topic_poster=$current_displayed_user ORDER BY topic_time DESC LIMIT 10";

$results=$wpdb->get_results($query);

foreach ($results as $result) {

echo "

<li><a>topic_id."'>".$result->topic_title."</a></li>

";

}

?>

</ul>

[af3]

The code from detective works. I’m using wpmu+bp+bb; so i added this to bb theme functions.php (yes! if you dont have custom functions.php, just create one) and it works.

add_action(‘bb_init’, ‘profile_redirect’);

function profile_redirect() {

if (is_bb_profile() && $_GET != ‘edit’ && $_GET != ‘favorites’) {

$user = bb_get_user($_GET);

if ($user) wp_redirect(“http://www.example.com/members/&#8221; . $user->user_nicename);

}

}

now, trying to find code to show user’s forum (bbpress) posts to show in the BP profile.

[Michael]

I didn’t even know there was a download counter! This is great!

When bbPress 1.1 comes out, I’m sure it’s counter will reach 100k in no time at all.

[Gautam]

Just checked the counter. It’s 50k+ now – http://bbpress.org/download/counter/

Also, bbPress 0.9 is close to the 150,000 mark: http://bbpress.org/download/counter/legacy

[Gautam]

It should be added (also signatures, emotions, bbCode etc.). People should get to know the power of bbPress on this forum itself.

[Gautam]

Hey,

That’s great news!

[QuickD]

It mentions in the readme file to do this:

Copy and paste this: <?php bbad_ad_block(); ?> as the first line of post.php (before <div class="threadauthor">)

but I cannot find (before <div class="threadauthor">)

anywhere in post.php file, can it be the very first item of post.php?

[fundomaat]

The theme you’re using is a very hard one, so you could expect problems ]

And thanks to you for releasing this plugin, make sure to get in the directory!

https://bbpress.org/plugins/forum/requests

[Michael]

This ia a great plugin! Thank you very much!

I did have to make quite a lot of edits to get it to display correctly, but I’m sure most will – depending on the theme they’re using.

I’ve been looking for this for a long time. Kudos!

[Maurice]

I’ve finally finished bbBlog 2.0. This plugin adds a blog page to you bbPress forum, using posts from a forum category, specified by you. (For those wanting to do some simple blogging without the WordPress installation hassle…)

You can download it here:

http://www.bbportal.org/bb-downloads/bb-blog2.0.zip

Demo:

http://www.bbportal.org/mssp/view.php?view=blog

Features:

– Total rewrite of the bbBlog plugin (1.0 compatible)

– Now a link to the blog is created under the “Views list” at the front-page (forum index)

– The blog items are now correctly filtering bold text, hyperlinks, smilies, etc (thanks _ck_)

– Comments() link now goes to the first comment made (thanks _ck_)

– You can now prevent members and guests to start blog posts (they can still reply)

– Now also showing topic tags

– Added sticky support: Topics marked as sticky now show on top on the blog page

– Admin display redesigned to match bbPress 1.0 admin area

– Blog post date uses the same Date Format as set in: Admin -> Settings -> General -> Date Format

– Now shows blog main category no subforums yet)

– Now pre-loads the selected (blog) forum in the dropdownlistbox in the admin area (thanks Ben L.)

To do:

– Set as start page, can be done by htcacces, how does WP do this?

– Generate a nicer error message when there are no topics in the blog like: “No blog started yet”

– Show some confirmation when settings are saved (this is broken in 1.0)

– Add pagination

– A “Read more” functionality. Show a Read more link after an amount of words set in the admin

– Add: You are not allowed to create new topics (like when locked topics)

– Sub category support (admin option?)

– Separate tags with commas

Enjoy!

ps: I am NO programmer, so don’t expect much support. Code suggestions and help (esp. with Read more and pagination) are welcome.

[arpowers]

We have to charge to make these types of things possible; we’ll be doing a BBPress addon for each of our current themes plus the new ones coming.

Currently the forum code is GPL; although we do things to prevent ‘free’ distribution.

I will say that being on Automattic’s good side is pretty core to our business model and I think Thesis has taken the wrong approach.

[Bluealek]

PLEASE make the integration of bbPress into WP just as simple as WP Forum / Forum Server – for these plugins all you have to do to integrate the forum is to make a blank page and insert a HTML code like [VastHTML].

I’m still running Forum Server only because I can’t integrate bbPress the way I’d like to, but I’d really love to switch because of it’s far superior forum possibilities (and it looks like the WP Forum / Forum Server development has been discontinued, so their bugs will probably never be solved).

Oh, another important thing for the wishlist: make it possible to import the WP Forum / Forum Server database.

[grassrootspa]

If I had to rank them:

1) WYSYWYG / rich editing (tie!)

1) Facebook Connect (tie!)

3) Integration with WordPress (that login cookie thing really needs to be fixed)

The rest: interesting but the above 3=LOVE

4) Anonymous posting

5) Private messaging

6) Embed support, like videos

7) Email notification

Keyboard navigation

OMG, it would be awesome if ‘FB Connect’ was introduced into 1.1. This would mean it would only be a matter of time before ‘IntenseDebate Connect’! WOO HOO!

@ Olympus: I bet FB connect was a second or third choice for many folks