[Martin R.]

Footer tells me: 0.397 seconds – but thats relative. I will change host and server when I publish the board. I just know 4 other boards that are faster on my server right now. So its not exactly beeing about “slow” – Its about making it faster. Perhaps with Caching because my board will have 90% passive readers/guests who can wait a few minutes for updates and should not slow it down.

But thanks. Looks like there arent any tipps or a caching-plugin. To bad, bbPress would be really great.

Firefox/Firebug/Yslow/Pagespeed-Tests:

Punbb: 200ms

Vbulletin: 200ms

Minibb: 300ms

Seoboard: 400ms

BBpress: 500ms

Phpbb: 500ms

Vanilla: 600ms

+-50ms

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

anointed – If I were you, I’d leave it alone and keep vbulletin. There’s no reason to change if everything’s working and you don’t hate vbulletin Now, if you do hate it…

[Anointed]

To preface, I know nothing about bbpress other than it’s installed with my new buddypress setup.

I have run vbulletin on numerous websites for years now so that is what i am familiar with.

As my ultimate plans include using wordpressmu/buddypress/forums, can someone let me know why I should consider using bbpress?

Are there features that it has that other software does not provide?

Please, I am not being antagonistic here, it’s a real question.

so far my vbulletin setup has the following:

1. completely bridged to wordpressmu so that all registration/logins/sessions etc are controlled by vbulletin for the entire system. Meaning you login to vb, you are logged into wp automatically etc..

2. vbulletin uses wordpress theme header/footer etc. It’s not static, meaning that if the header in wp changes it auto changes in vb, and NO, I am not using iframes, that’d be just plain stupid.

thanks for any info provided.

[baltzer]

Hi All,

I am getting a decent about of comments to my WordPress news blog. Problem is that these posts are scattered over many posts, so does not seem to be much activity.

Could bbpress be the solution? I want it to be possible for users to overview the discussion at the various news articles.

If you have seen a solution on an other website, please send me a link.

I have also looked at a integration of WordPress and vbulletin, but seems like a solution this is not without problems.

Hope to hear from you

Michael

[cldnails]

Agreed with statements here, bbPress wasn’t created(being developed) to compete with the likes of vBulletin, SMF, etc. This is forum software that is light weight, no lacey undergarments, ready to roll and fast. If you want silly add-ons, a ton of user generated themes, and/or costly support looking elsewhere may be your best bet.

[Filipe Deschamps]

Hmm, this VBulletin plugin is very interesting.

[alehawk]

Hi!

I normally use VBulleting forum, several of my sites runs it but I algo use wordpress in some sites and for a new one I was looking for something in the middle betweeen forum and blog and I thing I got it with bbpress.

I know it isnt like WordPress but I like it.

To the point, in VBulletin I got a automatic thread tagger, it will add tags automatically to the posts, it works just fine, you can exclude words like TO, FOR, THE, etc.

I guess something like that is missing here. I dont know how to code it.

Tnx!

[whitewall]

Thanks for the very informative reply _ck_,

The reason I got interested in bbPress is not that we are trying to cut corners or find a cheap solution. It’s more like we would like to find a very simple and a lightweight bulletin board without built-in options we actually do not need. And somehow bbPress 0.9 looks much like what we are after.

Our forum has been running on phpBB since 2001 and the software has had it’s well-known problems. We have also tested the vBulletin – we have even the commercial license and have used lots of time and effort to make our other extensions work with it. But at the end vBulletin has too many options and it is too complex for our needs. We don’t need all those options it offers – we need a simple solution which would integrate nicely into our website.

We have already two dedicated servers (actual machines, not virtual ones), one handles the www-stuff (running apache…) and the other serves as the database server. Right now we have only the phpBB running with a couple of scripts of our own so I guess there’s resources more than we need.

The search issue would be solved by using Google’s search, that’s what we use right now with the phpBB but the lack of caching may be an issue.

Maybe we should keep searching the ultimate BB solution for us or try to customize the phpBB3 to fit our needs and figure out some non-WP solution for the WordPress post commenting.

[_ck_]

Let’s put it this way, if you have decent income from a forum of that size, you should not waste another minute your time (or anyone else’s) and just pay for vbulletin and the extra hardware it will need at that size (dedicated mysql and email servers). Seriously, it’s the best for a reason, but you will have to pay for everything once you go down that path, addons, etc.

If you are trying to cut corners and do it on the cheap, bbPress 0.9 is lightweight enough to handle it (wordpress.org has many times the traffic you do) though a dedicated mysql server can always help, and keep in mind bbPress has no caching plugins available yet. The money you save will be spent in hours of customization and tuning and creating your own fixes for problems.

You can always turn to lighttpd or nginx if you know your stuff and have days to fiddle with it or the almost instant installing litespeed, if you want an apache replacement that will double the capacity of your server.

The only cloud on the horizon is bbPress 1.0 as I estimate it in some cases will be roughly 30-50% slower than 0.9 (with still no caching plugins) and at this time roughly half of my plugins will not work with it (and won’t for quite some time, assume the end of 2009 at the soonest).

After 1.0 stabilizes and someone ports WP Super Cache to it, that will change the picture again but that kind of caching only helps visitors that aren’t logged in.

Oh and bbPress isn’t going to solve your search problems. It will only make it worse. bbPress’s search is completely non-indexed, and has virtual no options. My Super Search plugin might eventually cache searches but that’s not going to solve the problem of 1000 users searching for different things at once. I mentioned http://sphinxsearch.com a few months back and amazingly they are now using it on wordpress.com so there is hope that one day there will be a plugin for wordpress/bbpress to use it for searches on larger sites which will completely solve the performance problem.

Your groups of forums will require bbPress 1.0 and the downside of that again is half the plugins for bbPress 0.9 will not work with it. If you do install 1.0, don’t install anything more than 1.0 alpha 5 to use with my plugins.

ps. the top 100 list hasn’t been updated in 90 days and many of those forums are much bigger now – next update will be sometime after Firefox 3.1 is released

[whitewall]

Thanks for the replies.

We have had some performance issues also with phpBB so far, especially with the latest topics and phpBB2’s search system. Also phpBB is too complex for our usage because we need to customize the board for our needs and integrate it into our webzine and other scripts we will use in our website’s next version.

Our combination would be a wordpress installation for a webzine which will be managed by only a small number of our editors but it would be nice to have all our registered users to comment the posts logged in with their accounts.

Then the bulletin board should be readable by all visitors but posting is for only the registered users. We should have our 52 forums categorized in 5 or 6 different groups. And there are also various private forums which should be readable and writeable only by a certain user groups. I guess this is not fully supported by bbPress or it’s plugings yet?

Then we would customize the user profile page and user registration and management system into our own, because there will be paid “VIP” members and free registered users and users should be also categiorized in different groups. Also we have our own solution for the private messaging. I guess all this could be done outside the bbPress.

There are also few scripts of our own such as event calendar, classified ads, galleries etc. which would use the same user management / login system.

So the main usage of bbPress would be handling the forum posting, editing and basic forum stuff and together with WordPress and our own extensions they would make a nice platform for a social networking online community. Maybe some of these customizations and extensions of ours would even be possible to publish as a plugins when they’re ready and working.

We have studied also vBulletin and SMF but so far bbPress seems to be the best bb for our needs.

[_ck_]

Yeah they do that for vbulletin and phpbb too, so I suspect it’s a problem they have to work out.

[_ck_]

Several month ago, Google started showing special meta data in search results for popular forums like vBulletin and phpBB, like how many posts in a topic, the last date of the last post, etc.

Unfortunately since every forum type is different, younger forum types were left out, including bbPress. I tried to find the right person to contact at Google to help them add bbPress, but to no avail.

However I was very pleased to notice tonight that Google is suddenly showing meta info for sites using bbPress forums!

Here is a search example:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Abbpress.org+forums+browser

Here is a highlighted snapshot in case you have no idea what I am taking about:

http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/9336/googlebbpressdetectionok7.png

It’s only working on a handful of sites using bbPress at the moment but hopefully that will grow and this is a very good sign.

[John James Jacoby]

You know, I’ve thought about this type of thing, and I think that bbPress really tries to hide the forum layout as much as possible. It doesn’t surprise me that it would work this way, as super stickies tend to really act like forum wide announcements than as stickies. That being said, showing them in a forum that’s already halfway hidden is a little redundant.

bbPress really does work much differently than your typical forum, and it takes a little massaging to make it feel like phpBB or vBulletin.

[romerocw]

I’m trying to make my front-page.php template look a little more like a conventional vBulletin type theme by displaying the “last post title and link” in a column next to the “forum title.” The problem is that topic_title() isn’t giving me what I want inside the loop. I guess I need some sort of nested loop or an alternate function.

Here’s an example of a vB style i’d like to emulate:

Main Car Forum (This is a top level forum)

Car Forums by Brand <– this is a bbPress category forum w/ subforums per car brand.

— Honda Forum 1…………………….. last post: my car broke down

— BMW Forum 2…………………….. last post: new tires?

The problem is when I play w/ the front-page template I can only get the last post info for the “Main Car Forum” not the brand subforums and even that isn’t actually giving me what I think it should.

Here’s what I have in my 2nd HTML column of my modified template:

<td class="topicTitle"><a href="<?php topic_last_post_link(); ?>"><?php topic_title(); ?> </a>

<br /><span class="lastPoster">by <a href="<?php user_profile_link($topic->topic_last_poster) ?>"><?php topic_last_poster(); ?></a></span>

</td>

The topic_last_post_link and topic_title() aren’t giving me the expected results. For topic_last_post_link it’s actually returning the last topic/thread link not the last post link and that’s for the “Main Car Forum.” For the subforums it’s displaying the same exact thing as it does for “Main Car Forum” it’s not actually displaying the topic/post info for the correct subforum.

TIA,

-Charlie

[Famous]

Why doesn’t bbPress incorporate email notifications? Isn’t that a no brainer, how else is a person notified of changes to their topic? RSS VS eMail, outcome, eMail wins–right? Not everyone is a techie type of person. They post their questions and if email is not setup they won’t ever know what the answer was?

vbulletin will always be tops if these issues are not dealt with, right?

I am an outsider please put down the stones I am just curious…

[WarrenScott]

I have the exact same problem but even when they login to wordpress 2.7 they are shown “You don’t have permission to view this page”.

I have to manually change their role to subscriber which is not ideal at all. It seems to me that bbPress should make a user who registers through the forum a “subscriber” in wordpress but it’s not. I think bbpress should have the same roles as wordpress to cut the confusion down. The whole purpose of using bbpress was because it intregated with wordpress but if it doen’t habdle the roles automatically, I may as well install phpbb or vbulletin.

I love bbpress, but if I have to perform task manually, what is the benefit of using bbpress?

[WarrenScott]

Same problem here. The bbpress roles need to match those of wordpress roles. I played with this for hours to the point I’m ready to ditch bbpress and just install vbulletin or phpbb. I love the intregration though. Everything else works great except when user register through bbpress.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Vbulletin makes me want to cry, regularly. I used to use Invision (someone else paid for it) but their templating system made every upgrade a two day project. SMF similarly, though the code is much easier. That ain’t saying much

Not that I think bbPress is perfect. If I had to pick anything but bbPress, I’d do SMF.

[_ck_]

There are only two other solid options IMHO. Vbulletin and SMF.

If you are running a commercial or for-profit site, Vbulletin, otherwise SMF.

You will never get them to blend with an existing site however

and writing your own plugins for either can give one brain damage.

[_ck_]

I’m not sure how many more times I can repeat that bbPress is pre-release software.

Automattic isn’t making a dime off it, it’s not being promoted, there’s no guaranteed support, all assistance, plugin development is completely voluntary. Every part of bbPress is subject to completely change and break overnight. There is no timetable, there are no feature or bug priorities. Assume you will be on your own.

If that bothers anyone, or they feel the need to rant about it, please stop using it asap and go get SMF – I am completely serious about that. I’ve sent several people about here to vbulletin where money was no object and they could afford it and all the extra hardware it requires when they grow. It has every feature you could possibly want after 10 years of development and all the bloat and price tag to prove it.

If you want forums directly integrated with WordPress and don’t like bbPress, you can go use one of the several discontinued single-developer plugins available for WordPress. They are all slow and buggy and break with every wordpress upgrade, but there you go.

Integration is tricky because it was not a priority for bbPress in the first year or two and there is no such thing as a “standard” wordpress install, everyone has their own weird configuration. The radical changes to WordPress security in the past year have not helped at all with integration ease. Sam is going to try to make integration easier in a future version by creating a plugin for WordPress that assists with the process (in fact a WP integration plugin has now become a requirement because of some recent changes with WordPress).

I suspect bbPress will become much more of a priority for Automattic in 2009 but there’s no guarantee about that of course. So weigh your options and either stick with it or move on but please don’t rant against the very people trying to help the project.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Ipstenu,

I’m going to disagree with you a little mate, and try not to take it off topic too much.

Yes, each adjective is subjective to ones perspective. “easy” and “alot” etc. can mean different things to different people. That said, lets look at them a sec.

“extensive plugins?”

There are just under 120 plugins for BBPress.

Over 1/3rd haven’t been updated in a year. I’d wager a good few of them don’t work anymore.

And the ones with latest comments 6-12 months ago, usually don’t work either.

Also from what i’ve seen about 1/4 of them are redundant or useless in 0.9 / 1.0alpha.

So we’re looking at maybe 40-50 plugins.

Does anyone think that’s “extensive”?

I know it’s subjective, but, um, well you can make up your own mind.

“You CAN redesign the hell out of a bbPress site”

To a certain extent i’ll agree and disagree with it. To redesign a bbpress forum so that it doesn’t look like this theme actually takes a bucket load of work. I’ve done it for 3 websites, and every time it’s involved me writing full on plugins just to output the right code, or W3C acceptable code, or overwrite the damned code thats stored outwith the templates (why is that btw?).

Can i stop and ask that? WHY does a theme designer NEED to write alot of non basic php code as a separate to their theme plugin, just to over write HARDCODED design output? Since when was hardcoding design output into the core of a theme-able piece of software a good idea?

What you can’t do with bbpress, is hand a Designer/ HTML coder your template files and expect to get anything back that’s not a flat output of a table. It’s a point I raised a while ago (and i’ll not bang on about it) but BBpress works at doing one thing. Outputting a flat list from a database.

In terms of your all forums kinda look the same , i have to agree in this instance. Most forums, ipb/vBulletin/phpBB etc do all look the same. but guess what. bbpress doesn’t look much like them. I’ve stated before BBpress’s horrific handling of parent/children with categories etc. is bloody woeful; but if you’re talking about usability, then bbpress starts to fall down a little.

What it outputs is simple, yes, to the user, but it’s not very perceptive. Finding a specific post or vital information (say that 0.9 = WP2.5 – you know , something you’d expect to be on the documentation or download page but is actually on page 3 of a topic started 1 year ago) , is a disaster. It’s reliant on the user

who posted the content using TAGS appropriotely and ofc it requires a better search function.

Lets not forget that ‘tags’ are fairly new, and really only web savvy people use/know about them. A huge chunk of this software’s cross-pollination and iteration is taken out of the developers hands and placed smack bang in teh hand of the end user (whom we know nothing about nor can reply on).

Just because something is simple/plain, does not make it inherently usable.

Think Boo.com.

================================================

Anyway, there are a number of things we’d all like to see fixed in bbpress. Some more vital than others. we’ll all agree and disagree on many, but my over riding feeling is this:

Our Clients, customers, friends, colleagues, schools, own sites, will at some stage like to, nah need to, be updated to the latest version of WordPress. it will vary from person to person, but at some stage you know that a wordpress upgrade is probably in the pipes.

But if you’re using BBpress, then you’ve been forced to hold off upgrading for over half a year. We will be/are a whole version behind, and surely someone can see that it’s got to be an issue.

I suppose what i dont understand is, and maybe i’m the only one, so please 100% feel free to explain it to me like an idiot.

if The most requested topic on this website is “wordpress integration”, and the singular fail point of the software is “wordpress integration”, and teh company that owns this software also own wordpress, and it happens to be your singular initial selling point of the software, um, well, WHY THE HELL HAS IT NOT BEEN THE ONLY PRIORITY AND FIXED IN THE 3 MONTHS SINCE 1.0ALPHA CAME OUT?

We’ve had other fixes, new code, new features, a facebook page (see i hadn’t forgotten), but yet without even a hint of when this base level feature might appear, we’re told it’s a moving target.

Please, explain it to me like a 5 year old, that hasn’t read the blog posts linking to the $29 million dollars investment, that also lead to Sam being taken on as a full time developer on bbpress (i.e. dont say no time/resources).

[_ck_]

I just disagree with promoting a product before it’s even usable.

bbPress is very usable, just not finished. But it’s certainly *not* being promoted. All we have is this support forum. If it was being promoted, it would be listed on WordPress.org/WordPress.com and there would be hundreds of thousands of users. bbPress currently has less than 10,000 active installs. That should change by this time next year.

bbPress was originally written by Matt to simply give a support forum for WordPress (WordPress.org). Everything from there was just Matt releasing the source. There never was a general plan after that until Matt started talking about TalkPress which is still very far away by my best guess.

bbPress’s greatest strength is it can be integrated in many websites easily and made to look like them easily. But it’s still a growing child and very young. If you are looking for a polished product, you need something with over half a decade of development like phpBB, vBulletin or SMF. The downside to them is they are very rigid and hard to develop for. bbPress is incredibly easy to develop for, I only learned PHP a few years ago and look what I’ve managed to do. Just imagine what a person who knew what they were doing could do

[johnhiler]

bbPress supports full exporting of your data into XML or other formats. Does vBulletin have robust importing tools? If so, this should be pretty straightforward!

URLs of each topic/thread may change though… unless you can get the two softwares to generate similar URLs.

[chrishajer]

Sure, anything is possible.

This might come along at some point:

http://bbxf.org/

[chrishajer]

_ck_ – FWIW, I hate the vBulletin search layout.