_ck_ maybe my tastes have changed? It’s not a perfect name but it does have historical significant and attachment for me. The integration will be the completion of the arc that started with my first checkin, because I felt the data structures of author-started versus user-started discussions were fundamentally different, and I could do it much faster on a DB structure just like minibb, which is what we used to use on WordPress.org and one of the first forums I really liked. (After attempting vBulletin and phpBB a number of times.)
We also have a history of major changes in 0.1 releases. We might indulge in a little bit of inflation with a 2.0.
I’ve been wondering that if addition to being part of the plugin directory for people already using WP, we could offer a pre-bundled download here on bbPress.org that could set up WP + bbP seamlessly so from a user experience point of view they’re still getting a “standalone” piece of software, just with a far more robust admin and update system. (Just a thought, we’ll figure it out when we get there.)
I stand corrected, again. I missed the bit “Home >> Web forums >> Vbulletin >> May, 2009″.
No wonder…
Thank you.
Bob
Ah the problem is fixed now, found the site via google.
The page you are linking to for suggestions is for vbulletin which is an entirely different forum program.
Hi! I’m a brand new bbpress user, and looking forward to getting better acquainted with all of you. However I do have an immediate issue on which I could use some advice.
I’ve made a conversion from vbulletin 3, via phpbb3, to bbpress 1.0.2. In the process, none of the slugs for the forums or topics fields were populated. Would any of you have a nice solution for that handy?
I’ve put this in the Installation topic, because bbpress isn’t broke. I believe this is more likely an artifact from the conversion. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Regards,
Dan White
I doubt people neither chose nor leave a forum because they’ve not implemented TinyMCE; which is not to say that some people don’t like WYSIWYG, but it’s importance is often overstated.
phpBB, as your example, seems to be doing ok without it. I’m sure I saw them hit their 10th birthday and gazillionth download not that long ago. Basiaclly, phpBB has been around since before Google.
you converted your forum from a wysiwyg based forum; vbulletin (native), phpbb (as plugin).. to bbpress, you loose lot of formatting
Why did you lose your formatting?
Thats not a bbPress thing, was it in the conversion (i haven’t done one yet)?
Is the formatting still in the post?
If it is, there are numerous bbCode plugins for bbPress for years now. Let us know what’s gone and I’ll try and help you sort that. I think that could be a nice fix for you! 
it is not an option, it is a must-have feature in every successful board
http://www.kevinjohngallagher.com/2010/03/basic-versus-standard/
Hello there,
It would be really a nice thing to have a wysiwyg editor in bbpress, just like the one that wordpress have: TinyMCE, since it is open source.
the current editor is too much simple and complex at the same time especially when:
* you converted your forum from a wysiwyg based forum; vbulletin (native), phpbb (as plugin).. to bbpress, you loose lot of formatting.
* most of the users don’t know how to deal with bbcode.
* you need a fast way to copy-past formated text and images.
* currently no efficient wysiwyg plugin available in the bbpress plugins.
* it is not an option, it is a must-have feature in every successful board.
most phpbb forum owners criticized harshly the lack of wysiwyg in phpbb; people keeps asking for it and phpbb developers keep ignoring them and saying that they want to keep phpbb simple!!! so users leave to other forums!
for the people who like the current bbpress simple editor, bbpress can offer a switch in the dashboard to toggle wysiwyg editor on and off.
what do you think?
I am setting up a new intranet site built on WP 3.0 and would really like to keep the forums to a very simple tool just like bbPress (phpbb, vbulletin, etc are all too bloated for our needs). Since the site is only accessible inside our company network I don’t want to have to worry about authentication, I would like the ability for users who visit the forum to simply post messages or responses.
Is this something that can be done out of the box or would a lot of custom work be involved? Thanks!
-Chad
I’m using Tapatalk on my iPhone right now, accessing an SMF forum and I love the layout. It’s much easier to browse, reply and post with Tapatalk than using Safari on the iPhone.
According to Tapatalk’s website:
“Tapatalk is a forum app for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia. The app provides super fast forum access to any vBulletin, IPBoard, phpBB and SMF forums that have activated Tapatalk. Forum owner can download the free plug-in to activate Tapatalk in your forum.”
I searched their site for mention of bbPress, and found this thread:
http://tapatalk.com/forum/showthread.php?p=10919
The final post, from the moderator: “we can provide the API doucment if someone from the BBPress team want to take the bullet to implement it. I know that someone has ported it to MyBB so I don’t see why not?”
I would love to see a Tapatalk plugin for bbPress (especially one that supports v0.9).
Interested parties should check the “About Us” page on the Tapatalk website…
Hi Guys
I’m new on the block, but have considerable experience with forum software and server enrironments. I also have a little fleet of WordPress sites, LOL. I haven’t grokked all the bbPress stuff yet, but this is a very interesting topic.
-ck- and paulhawke both made some very good points there.
Based on what I know of other systems, the observation about cacheing is accurate. Also a fairly competent Forum program is likely to become considerable larger than any blog because of the nature of the communications, which is many-to-many, rather than one-to-many. Tts not uncommon for forums to have fifty to a hundred thousand posts. How many blogs do you know like that? Just like WP, it all has to be iterated to do a page generation.
Forums are also very spiky, due to their many-to-many, interactive nature. One post begets another or another five. Other than add-ins, Blogs are effectively document retrieval systems where there is a time disconnect between related events.
For these reasons, I lean toward the idea of either hybrid or standalone development. Another concept would be that the plug-in have either less capabilities or some size limits coded in. Sure people could code around, but they would also be on notice that ‘you may be heading for trouble’.
I’m looking forward to what’s coming.
I’m going to do something strange here AmplifiedShock, I’m going to ask you NOT to do that.
The “bbPress” that BuddyPress uses is not the same as this “bbPress”. It is heavily heavily modified. Basically the whole of BackPress is removed and replaced by custom functions, and then some of the middle tiering has been rewritten, and a little bit of the front end output and default theme.
A large chunk of the support requests we deal with each day/week is people coming here because BuddyPress calls their forums “bbPress”. We need to be able to tell people honestly and without looking like we’re being difficult, that if they use BuddyPress we can’t help them.
I’m sure it’s technically possible to do anything. I’m sure once it’s technically possible, it’s easier to write a guide for people to follow. You seem to be good enough to do that But with bbPress being turned into a WP plugin and Matt publicly telling people not to use this software; inviting more support queries that end in “we simply can’t help you” isn’t going to help us at all.
Now if you felt like writing more tutorials on converting from other forums to bbPress, I’m sure there would be a good market in that for you!
And, as always, thanks for your time
Thanks guys!
I’m currently working on integrating WordPress 3 (WMPU), bbPress, and BuddyPress so that they all use the same database. I’ll post the results and a guide when I get it to work!
Thanks for the writeup!
To those reading, the “limitations of converting” section is key. Read that section before starting with the guide.
I thought it was an excellent guide. Truly awesome.
Nice work man. Nice work.
Guide to WordPress integration is now up. Ah, that was a good day and a half of playing around in phpMyAdmin, bbPress, and WordPress!
Hello everyone,
I just wrote a guide to basically achieve what the title says. Two reasons:
(1) There isn’t a vb4-to-bbPress converter out there making the process more difficult then it should be
(2) The answers are out there if you’re willing to search for hours like I did 
I decided to piece together all my research into a single guide
Credit, of course, goes to the generous souls who created the vB-to-phpBB and the phpBB-to-bbPress converters, which are both required.
I’m still working on the integration with WordPress part which should be up soon. If you guys see any errors, please let me know.
Hope this helps!
Edit: Forgot the link! http://www.ericm.ca/2010/articles/vbulletin-4-to-bbpress-and-wordpress-integration
mikkelsen, I actually came across your posts during my research into converting. I would like to avoid the password issue that you ran into because I don’t think I would be able to convert a large % of my 60,000 membership base if action is required on their part. Another requirement for me is to import all attachments and private messages.
That is where things get really tricky because then you’re talking about involving non-core plug-ins as part of the import process.
All in all, though, I think it would be a project well worth undertaking and we would see a quick uptick in activity on bbPress plug-in development and forum discussion.
Hey,
This is probably not what you want, but I just recently made the switch from vBulletin to bbPress. I converted my vBulletin database to phpBB, and then I converted the phpBB database to bbPress. The only issue with this solution is that all your users have to choose “Recover password” the first time the try to log in on the new forum, because the passwords can’t be converted due to some password protocol phpBB or vBulletin uses.
Everything else works great though, and I’m very happy with the switch.
This can be very challenging. The vBulletin SQL schema is very complicated and it isn’t, as far as I know, well documented.
Hi all –
I’m new here, but have been doing a lot of research recently on moving my bridged Drupal/vBulletin site to WordPress and bbPress. There have been many changes with vBulletin management and policies lately, and many people are looking for alternatives to VB as their forum software. The only obstacle keeping me from jumping into bbPress is a direct vBulletin -> bbPress import script.
In my opinion, this is the only thing keeping bbpress from really catching on fire. If anyone has the know-how to do it and is interested, I can help fund the script. If anyone else would like to throw in to help the creation of it, please chime in. Once it’s done we can give it to the community and watch bbpress explode.
After lots of tried back and fourth I managed way that worked great.
After the database was moved, I just registered a new user. Then I manually made that new user an admin via phpMyAdmin. I then logged in to the bbPress admin and manually created a password for my original user.
I’m however the only one on the forum that doesn’t get an email. I suppose it’s because I had the ID of 1.
Anyway, thanks for all your help.
I’m not sure why, but the fonts look fine and comparable to other sites here, for me. This is with Chrome 5 on Windows or Linux. FWIW.
CTRL+ takes care of font resize if I need it without any trouble. But I’ve never had to do that here.
Now THIS site has really small fonts on my system: http://faustltd.com/
For some reason design and architecture firms always seem to want those tiny fonts.
I think in the long run, that rather than porting bbPress to a WordPress plugin as a “straight port”, there will be a halfway house of using WP3.0’s custom post types and taxonomies. I’m guessing at this, but haven seen some attempts at this on the beta already, it seems to make alot of sense.
EDIT: found justin tadock’s example @ http://justintadlock.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/forum-post-type.png
(sorry for the number of spelling mistakes, i simply can’t read these hideously small text they’ve forced on us by using font-size in pxels)
The problem is every website has different needs.
Some have only 10 visitors a day but the site operator wants every feature including the kitchen sink. They don’t care if it takes several seconds for their page to render as long a they have every fancy feature available and they can just use wp-super-cache to deal with the load.
But other sites have thousands of visitors a day and when a page takes too much cpu time or mysql time to render, then you multiply that by hundreds of simultaneous connections. Then you fail and your host kicks you off or you have to buy a bigger server.
WordPress started lean and mean, 1.5 was good, 2.0-2.1 was a great product. Then they started throwing in the kitchen sink. Then with every next release started breaking compatibility with every release, changing cookies, changing admin structure. 3.0 is a scary creature indeed.
There is no doubt in my mind that a bbPress plugin under WordPress is going to require 1 megabyte of code executing per instance with plugins in a realistic environment. The site operator with 10 visitors per day won’t care because they have every feature the could want in one package. The operator with an active, growing user based is going to have to constantly upgrade their server to handle the problem.
Active forums don’t deal well with caching, unlike blogs.
Blogs are write once, read many times.
Forums are write many times, read many times.
Different environment, different needs.
But performance should always be designed into software.
