[grassrootspa]

@ (my affable sparring partner) kevinjohngallagher:

1) re: the 350 million facebook users, there was just a story on Mashable ‘Facebook’s Road to 350 Million Users’: (http://mashable.com/2009/12/02/facebook-350-million-users/)

“Mark Zuckerberg’s note detailing Facebook’s latest privacy changes also contained an announcement about another important milestone for Facebook: 350 million users.”

Facebook’s own website: (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics):”‘More than 350 million active users”

I’m just going with what they said

2) I don’t have official ‘stats’ but can tell you Facebook connect is put to use on my site (I run Intense Debate, which offers various ways folks can leave comments). Twitter connect is occasionally as well (but not as much as FB connect) My general point is this: it’s optional and it and brings new folks into the discussion. IntenseDebate was smart to incorporate several different optional login methods! From my standpoint, I am very happy to offer FB connect to my readers

3) “So, who are these magical little elves that are going to build and then maintain all these features??” (BTW, I too am a South Park fan so I immediately got your reference):

Build and maintain all those features? You are missing my point…if existing popular plugins like ‘topic views’ or ‘bbcode’ are built into the core a third party no longer needs to maintain the plugin and make sure they don’t break in bbPress 1.0, bbPress 1.1, etc. They are STANDARDIZED and can be further fleshed out! (WordPress example: Just like WordPress did with the automatic updater and ability to thread comments…) _ck_ came up with some really slick and widely used plugins, and she is probably won’t be maintaining them from here on out. Maybe stuff like ‘BBcode Buttons’ should continue as a Core features?

Even though we both disagree on some of these things, we both want the same thing…bbPress to be more widely used & developed and the bbpress community to grow (those that make plugins, templates, etc). I would also like to see bbPress to emerge as a vBulletin alternative.

Again, things like Voices, gravatars, profile pics, profile occupation and location, tags etc could have all been simply left as plugins, but they were incorporated into the core. My overall point (forget FB connect for a sec) is that things like Voices, gravatars, profile pics, profile occupations, location, and other features are part of the core and that is a very good thing! It makes it easier for bbPress to be more widely used because a separate plugin is not needed for each (good for newbies, stability, and so community can further flesh them out via plugins or themes) There is less danger of those features breaking (they are now features of the Core, not separate plugins). The use of those features is standardized so plugins and themes can be developed to make use of those features without requiring a plugin to use each.

In a nutshell, I think things like bbcode, topic views, and some other plugins should sit alongside Voices, gravatars, etc as features that should be incorporated into the Core.

kevinjohngallagher, I love your passion. I am someone who is probably not as skilled as you are with computers and technology (17FB accounts…you sound busy!) I’m not a developer, just some newbie that taught himself how to run WordPress and bbPress by messing around with the stuff.

We aren’t going to agree on Facebook-connect (it’s a tougher sell than some of the others), but I would wager that there is probably a popular plugin or two that you might also agree should logically be part of the core for stability and out-of-the-box-feature issues. Thoughts?

[kevinjohngallagher]

If anything, this situation appears to fall into the issue i raised over a year ago here: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/parent-childrelationship-in-forum-loop

In the discussion that ensured, it transpired that BBpress doesn’t incorporate linaegae or heritage in anyway.

EDIT: OOps link may be wrong:

BBpress. Mindset, features and where now? discuss…

and specifically https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-mindset-features-and-where-now-discuss#post-20777 really help to see the fundamental of BBpress not understanding lineage/heritage in the core.

[OKTeaRoom]

chrishajer,

That is exactly what i was trying to accomplish. That way I can host forums for different sites on one central install. Is it possible?

[Raize]

You gotta learn bro. Set up a test site, and move stuff around till you get it. It’s pretty straight forward. Everything in the code pertains to something that gets displayed…you learned that from dreamweaver already. Move the code around, refresh, and see what happened. That’s how you’ll learn. Don’t be afraid to break it because it’s only a test site. It costs nothing to erase it and make a new test site.

[QuickD]

If you want to get bbpress out and working to the masses then put a lot of the plugins into the core where they would be better updated and maintained. Right now if you want to use plugins you need to hire a developer to implement and figure out how to work the plugin. The plugins are not updated and you need to figure out how to make the plugin work through the forum comment section.

Critical plugins that should be in the core would be something like a bbcode lite, bbbuttons, terms of service, quote function, allow images, allow video, signature, login with facebook. Private messaging perhaps. Security features like capatcha and prevent service provider addresses would also be good as part of the core. More unique features like BB Press Latest Discussions, Adsense, Flickr etc could be provided by way of plugins.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Chris,

Its even simpler.

Forum

– Sub Forum

no matter how often or how new a topic/post is in “Sub Forum” (or any sub forum), BBpress always considers that the latest post in Forum to be exactly that, the latest topic in Forum.

e.g.

UK – (topic: how to use this forum 5 months ago)

– Scotland (topic: Rules of the Scotland section – 4 months ago)

– – Edinburgh (topic: New post – 1 day ago)

Whenever querying UK as a Forum, and especially on the homepage where it lists forums, it never ever shows that the latest topic to be from its sub forums. Now if you’re like me and have a few parent/child relationships in your forums and keep a sticky closed at the upper most parent, tht means on the home page it will always show that sticky closed and not updated since (X months ago).

If i can give a geeky example from today: http://fellowshipoftheding.org/forums/

According to the homepage the bototm forum “Wrath of the Lich King”‘s latest discussion was 3 months ago, but if you actually click into it, and then into any of the sub forums, you can see thats not true.

It makes forums appear to be dated and or dead, and people are moe likely to just post a topic anywhere and then make a Moderator move it.

Thanks for your help,

Kev

P.S. I realise that BBpress has a “latest discussions” table, and that great if thats the point of your forum, but not all forums are like that.

P.P.S. My gut tells me, as it told me when i first reported this issue about a year ago in alpha2, that it appeared to me to a core issue. Parent/Child relationships aren’t exactly that, instead the whole thing feels like a port of _CK_’s old plugin into the core (of which this was a known issue).

[chrishajer]

So I understand what you’re trying to do, look at this page:

http://www.lawserver.com/forums/forum/elderly

On that page, there are three subforums (and not much traffic.) On this page, you would want to see latest discussions for each subforum, or latest discussions from any subforum, listed here? Trying to understand the scope of the problem. Thanks

[kevinjohngallagher]

This is a big one for me, and my number on complaint recieved from my forum users. While we spend alot of time talking about Private Messaging and TinyMCE etc. wouldn’t it be nice for the basics to just work?

Any advice on this is apprecaited.

[gerikg]

in WP go to /<home-folder>/wp-admin/options.php

check that everywhere you see the url has the www

Then go to your BBpress admin and click on Options check bbPress address (URL) see if the www is there.

try define( 'COOKIEPATH', '/<home folder>/wordpress/' ); first. Clear you cache after doing this. Then login and test it out.

if not.. then I ran out of ideas.

[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]

Hey citizenkeith… do you have bbPress benchmark installed?

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-benchmark/

I’d be interested in the number of queries/output time for your installs… I’ve seen a 10x speed difference in test installs and am wondering how common that is!

[kevinjohngallagher]

D’oh,

I hate when I reply to myself, but whenever people bring up Facebook Connect i try and remind them of how new Facebook is and how quickly social networking websites go from popular to past-tense (anyone trying to useMySpace connect???).

Facebook while monumentally huge, isn’t popular everywhere in the world, infact it’s popularity is very localised.

http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/world-map-social-networks.jpg

http://www.hardknoxlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/facebook-heat-map.jpg

http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c555153ef00e555100cc48834-500wi

Facebook is also popular with a certain demographic, a demographic that’s shown itself time and time again to be far more adaptable to registering/confirming/managing different user accounts that people of an older demographic. While Facebook Connect (like OpenID) is a great thing, its a feature that will mostly be used by people who would have signed up to comment anyway.

http://www.insidefacebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/20090201fbdemopie.png

http://www.insidefacebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/12-17-09-facebook-race-pic3.jpg

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/02/fastest-growing-demographic-on-facebook-women-over-55/

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Focussing on something like Facebook Connect, which may be good for the latest forum you’re working on or the demographic you’re currently aiming towards, takes development time away from features that would be useful for every forum you deploy.

P.S. That’s not to say i wouldn’t like Facebook Connect or OpenId sign-in; its just that i’d rather be able to fully administer my forum first before we spent time on some proprietary software which may either change or become unpopular as time goes on.

[kevinjohngallagher]

OK, i may be a little off the reservation here, but for me the One feature that BBpress has seriously lacked has been… The ability to complete simple/standard Administration tasks form the Backend.

Heck, some of them cant even be done at all…

Why is it that we’ve not been able to move a post from one Topic to another for 2 years (since 0.7’s plugin stopped working for 0.9a)? That seems a fundamental to me.

Why is it that we cant move/edit/delete/administer topics (and/or posts) from the Backend?

Matt, i realise that you’re trying to get to grips with a community that’s been downtrodden for the last year, and you’re re-galvanising what’s left, and that’s all very cool. But may i strongly, and humbly suggest, that BBpress to made to work as a forum and then we go about adding things?

I know that could sound a little condescending, but 0.9 had loads of plugins (they were horribly organised but they existed), and infact development of plugins and functionality for BBpress only started to slow down once the 1.0.3a debacle kicked off. Without getting all historical out of the 10 features you’ve asked us to vote for on the Poll, 8 of them existed and were working in a stable plugin for 0.9.

The realism is, BBpress has been a moving target for way too long and while its really great that you’re stepping in (and it is – thank you) there were 9 months of sheer Project Management craziness that have scared alot of Plugin Developers away.

Please, before you go adding any crazy “the public have spoken and they want …” features, how about getting a Project Plan, a Trac with actual data (and not a Trac that’s 4-5 months out of date as you’re trying to release software you’ve decided not to beta test, even though the last alpha had a huge number of bugs), and give us a platform to once again build upon.

Many Thanks,

Kevinjohn

ex- http://www.bbprogress.com

[grassrootspa]

@ timskii, great observations. re: “There’s a risk of being unable to upgrade because a key plugin won’t work anymore” and “Joanna Average forum reader doesn’t care about any of that, and is probably keener on things like WYSYWYG, email, etc”:

This is exactly why some of the more widespread plugins and features should be incorporated into the core as optional features one can turn on or off. It seems silly to force someone to download a plugin and mess with the template to do basic bulletin board admin tasks like display how many times a topic has been viewed, throw an icon next to each forum topic, allow rich text for those posting.

My only major complaint after a year of bbPress use is the lack of features/polish that exist in vBulletin. Simply put, its just too bare after initial install. I know this will be extremely unpopular to many of you, but over the past couple years there have been many great plugins developed, like private messaging, TinyMCE/rich text, topic views, Allow Images, Smilies, User Directory, Members Online, Related Topics, Reputation, Top Posters, Terms of Service, and some of these features should really be incorporated into the Core as OPTIONS that can be turned and off. So should stuff like the ability to set default topic icons, human test for signups (@$%@%$ spam users), widgets for the sidebar, ability to delete topics, Post Rating, etc. I’m not saying every single feature out there should be incorporated, but what is the hangup with more stuff that can be optionally turned on or off in the admin? If its in the Core, its not going to break when a new version comes out, and additional plugins can be developed to customize those features even more!

Right now bbPress is VERY bare after initial install so multiple plugins are required to snazz it up…and you can’t even edit the css or template from inside the bbpress admin. And yes there are plugins for everything but the kitchen sink, but some of the older plugins don’t work in newer versions of bbPress! Not sure how many of use also use IntenseDebate, but bbPress software’s core admin should consider have some of the same stuff which can easily be turned on or off, like voting, reputation, smilies (http://intensedebate.com/features or http://intensedebate.com/plugins)

How cool would it be for a brand new bbPress install to optionally display which users are online, how many views a topic has, or topic icons right out of the box with no fiddling with the css or template files/additional plugin installs? I’m not saying a Nintendo emulator or Weatherbug display should be built in, but if bbPress remains so barebone, it won’t fill the free-easy-to-install easy-to-use vBulletin alternative niche (it should).

[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>

[Michael]

Yes, bbPress can have sub forums of sub forums of sub-forums. I have never tested how far it can go, however.

[gerikg]

or you can install this plugin: https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/super-search/#post-2325

works for the latest 1.1

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Can people now use these plugins created and improve upon them so that they are now available in the latest version of BBpress?

Yes, that’s called GPL Just credit her original plugin in your spin-offs and make sure to release them under GPL.

[QuickD]

I understand that she is annoyed that she didn’t get much support financially in developing all of these plugins but is it professional to not recommend people continue on with BBpress. Can people now use these plugins created and improve upon them so that they are now available in the latest version of BBpress?

[Olympus]

Theme integration can still be performed without having to turn bbPress into a plugin, and in fact, it can be done via a simple CSS trick ( that means that the default CSS of bbPress should be rewritten so that it becomes more flexible, and every element ( forum tables, forms etc… ) should act as “objects” which can be automatically stretched vertically independently of their parents or I don’t know, where the parents will be objects in the WP stylesheet ) . So again, for theme integration, NO NEED TO TURN BBPRESS INTO A PLUGIN, because it’s just a CSS issue ( + little PHP coding, nothing serious ) !

Connecting the Admin sides of WP and bbPress ? This can be easily done via an OPTIONAL plugin ( or via XML-RPC calls, so that you can handle your bbPress forum even if it isn’t in the same host ) .

Turning bbPress into a plugin would be a nightmare, think of all the unnecessary WP calls … Why did I choose bbPress again ? To have a light forum or to have TWO frameworks ( WordPress and bbPress ) + unnecessary calls and files ?

The reason I choose bbPress at the beginning ( 3~4 years ago ) is because it’s from the creators of WordPress, so I hoped that it will be as easy to customize as WordPress, and that’s what I got ( even though, at the beginning it was really hard for me because I had to guess the function names, as there’s no Codex for bbPress ) and I’m very satisfied . I had the choice between bbPress, PunBB and Vanilla ( the lightest forums out there, and at the time, Vanilla had a greater number of plugins than bbPress ), but I stick with bbPress because it’s the easiest one to customize . So for those who think that bbPress can’t compete in the light forums market, you’re wrong !

[kevinjohngallagher]

The code is also 1 year old mate, and for a version of BBpress long since given up on since the RC1 was rushed out with no beta testing and very little alpha testing.

[zengyike]

in bb_post table there is lots of test post not been deleted,

i searched forum but i have no solve plan

[buddha-trance]

I tried what Ben L. suggested and it works fine even with a forum with no topics (in which case there is no topic title shown because there is none, and it shows a view count of 0)

I implemented it this way:

<td class="num"><a href="<?php $topic = $GLOBALS['topic'] = current( get_latest_topics( array( 'number' => 1, 'forum' => get_forum_id() ) ) ); ?>"><?php topic_title(); ?></a></td>

[plutopsyche]

I’m having this trouble too. I tried comparing everything that is topics.php, post.php, and post-form.php to the files in the kakumei theme, and there are no significant differences, yet the form won’t appear.

Example here: http://bookclub.plutonica.net/topic/test

I can create new topics as an admin and as a guest, but not reply to them. Any suggestions?

Thanks!