[Gautam]

@kevinjohngallagher

ChrisHajer should definitely NOT be the next project lead of BBpress. Chris is a great great moderator, and to remove him from this role would leave us with ZERO moderators.

Why would he be removed from the moderators list?

Gautam and Nightgunner5 are both programmers, skilled to be sure, but that does not make a good project lead either.

I can’t say about myself, but nightgunner5 would definitely be a good project lead. Can you provide a “why no” reason?

No, whoever leads BBpress will be from Automattic. It’s their project folks, they’re just letting us chat on their forums.

That doesn’t mean that one can’t contribute to it. At the end of the day, it is for the people who are using it.

At the end of the day, people will vote for people they agree with, and not in an objective manner, heck I’m confident that if I was to say that i think BBpress should not be a WP plugin and should have facebook connect then i could convince a least 2 people to vote for me, regardless of any actual facts.

That’s natural for a normal user. They want what they need.

Why are you always so angry, against everyone and ready to fight with every person..!?

(By the way it is bbPress not BBpress)

[bobtheman]

thanks for your reply kevin, the reasons of why bbpress should be a plugin was briefly discussed above in the topic, having bbpress contingent on wordpress belittles bbpress and strangles its ability to develope as an open source project.

1. As already addressed, the majority of people talking about integration, plugin, wordrpess .. if we took a long hard look arnt talking about it because they want bbpress to be a plugin, they just want some form of integration and use those terms interchangeably… very lossly might i add.

2. We are still an opensource project and the community matters. its up to the PM’s to get the community as a whole involved with submitting tickets, testing beta versions and getting interests in programing “recruiting”

3. its obvious people dont like the bbpress as a plugin idea, and when the team no matter who it is decides in disregard of the community it will show in the contributions.. case and point. The bbpress project doesn’t technically need funding from automattic “it would be nice though” .. because an opensource project like this should be able to develop a business plan and project plan and flourish as all other opensource projects do.

4. You’ve addressed why in your opinion we can change anything and our “votes” dont count. Congratulations… but you forgot to give your opinion and viewpoint on the topic at question.

oh yeah… there are programmers that can contribute to the project hiding amongst us

[kevinjohngallagher]

Another voting thread, awesome, these are always productive and rarely descend into sycophantic rants or love ins.

That said, ChrisHajer should definitely NOT be the next project lead of BBpress. Chris is a great great moderator, and to remove him from this role would leave us with ZERO moderators.

Gautam and Nightgunner5 are both programmers, skilled to be sure, but that does not make a good project lead either.

Mentions of _ck_ are like mentions of Elvis working in a 7/11. You hear it every now and then from people who don’t want to accept that it’s in the past.

No, whoever leads BBpress will be from Automattic. It’s their project folks, they’re just letting us chat on their forums. At the end of the day, people will vote for people they agree with, and not in an objective manner, heck i’m confident that if I was to say that i think BBpress should not be a WP plugin and should have facebook connect then i could convince a least 2 people to vote for me, regardless of any actual facts.

oh look:

My meaningless vote goes to whoever dislikes bbPress becoming a WordPress plugin the most

These type of threads are so awesome!! and so helpful!!

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m a big fan of people speaking their mind, I probably do it too often, but if we’re being honest, threads like these aren’t going to change anything. Even if you got 90% of the people that are on these boards to all come out and say that they agree with you, nothing will change.

Can we talk openly about this? It means sharing some hard truths…

1) There are roughly (roughly), 25 -30 different people that post on these forums every week. I’m sure you’ve noticed its the same folks for the most part over and over. Each of these people (you and I) represent a tiny tiny portion of the BBpress users. Its not that your opinions aren’t valued, it’s just that unless you come up with objective reasons behind your arguments then you’ll never see any changes you want.

2) You’re not programmers. Harsh, i know. But you’re on a support forum saying that you’re unhappy about proposed changes to free software that you don’t contribute to.

3) When did private companies start listening to people taking “votes” on their support forums. Oh, that’s right, never.

4) I’m going to make an assumption here (apologies if wrong), but you’re not project managers or BA’s either. Making BBpress a WordPress plugin (while not something i am happy with at all), makes sense from [the company that owns bbpress] stand point.

5) Matt, et all, are human and just trying to do their best. If you think they’ve overlooked a point then tell them. But it has to be a point that will make sense to a company like [the one that owns bbpress], and that rarely involves the phrase “i want” or “my vote”.

Look folks,

BBpress as a WordPress plugin is not going to come around any time soon. In honesty, it’s not going to be this year. if you don’t want a forum software that is focussed on integration with WordPress that’s cool, that’s a personal preference, but have a look on the tag list on the home page, and see what stands out.

WordPress integration is the single most talked about issue on the BBpress support forums because it’s the reason that a large percentage of people came to BBpress for.

We all have a different Wish List of features for this lovely piece of software, but that doesn’t mean that if BBpress doesn’t go our own personal way that it it’s “bbpress back on track”. if we’re honest, BBpress hasn’t been “on track” by it’s own standards for well over a year, but if you’re not contributing code or testing time, then frankly, your opinion is never really going to count for anything unless you back your points up with really really good objective reasons.

[grassrootspa]

@Gautam:

Nightgunner5 (Ben) would also be an excellent person to lead bbPress.

There certainly are quite a few talented folks who could potentially take some sort of evil dictator role.

haha, you are both new _ck_ s!

My meaningless vote goes to whoever dislikes bbPress becoming a WordPress plugin the most! They get a second vote if they want to add more features to the core (I vote early and often!)

[bobtheman]

independent vote, in case it wasn’t apparent.

[bobtheman]

i think, and im pretty sure Matt has stated himself that hes extremely busy and doesnt have the time to devote to bbpress that is needed. I know one things for sure, if a PM occurs they need to be bbpress project centric without major ties or interests in other projects.

[chrishajer]

1. I’m not a programmer, I’m a motorcycle mechanic

2. I appreciate the vote of confidence but I am happy to be a moderator and help bbPress users. I’m certain that if Matt thinks bbPress needs a PM other than himself, he knows where to find one.

[grassrootspa]

Well you have my ‘vote’ for keeping it independent but the plugin thing is probably a done deal…

[frooyo]

For what it’s worth, I nominate chrishajer as bbPress Project Lead.

It was brought up as an excellent next step in the thread linked below that Matt closed.

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/whats-happening-with-bbpress

@chrishajer, I’m not sure if you will accept this nomination. If you do, I’m definitely willing to donate $100 to you to help augment your expenses. I know it’s not much but it’s what I can budget right now.

---

Reason why I believe chrishajer is the most qualified:

* To date, chrishajer has been the only remaining devoted lead of bbPress. To my understanding, it’s also the only moderator of this forum beside Matt.

* chrishajer understands the needs of what bbPress users want. He also understands what’s need for a product be successfull, such as: setting release dates, establish features & bug fixes to work on, etc

* people respect chrishajer and would easily take lead from him

[EDITED title chrishajer 11 Feb 2010]

[chrishajer]

Devote some resources to bbPress? Put someone in charge of the project?

Unfortunately, the people who care about bbPress (and we complain because we care) are not always the same people who can help with programming.

[paulhawke]

@bingsterloot … “ask and ye shall receive” (to quote an age-old saying). Version 0.7 of the plugin has been released and votes are now immediately refreshed via AJAX and the old static “thanks” message removed from the admin area too.

[bingsterloot]

Hi Paulhawke

Thanks a bundle, it works like a charm ). I have only one thing left which is very minor.

Would it be possible to use Ajax when you have voted, so the vote appears right away, instead of having to reload the page before it appears?

Bingster

[paulhawke]

Version 0.6 has been released, with the features mentioned in my earlier post: no voting link if you’ve already voted, and an optional list of users who’ve voted “thanks”.

As always, let me know what you think.

[paulhawke]

Great feedback, thanks!

I’ll modify the plugin so that if you’ve already voted I’ll have it take away the voting link.

I’ll also look at writing out a list of who has voted “thanks”, but by default that output will be turned OFF. You will need to enable it via the admin interface.

Is anyone running this plugin on the 0.9 branch of code? I see no reason why it shouldnt function, but someone has asked if it does. If someone can give me a yes / no on that I’ll amend the “Requires version” tag accordingly.

[chandersbs]

Just installed it, here some feedback.

I’m using bbPress 1.0.1:

Some feedback:

– After voting on a post, it still shows the text to vote for that post (right next to the number of votes it has already

this should change into ‘who has voted already’ and if the person who voted on that post is reading, should NOT see it asking him to vote again on the same post, even if that isnt possible)

i love this plugin btw, vbulletin has this feature, and i always wanted something similar

[bingsterloot]

Hi Paul

Just another thing i noticed. I can say thanks multiple times on the same topic. I know that the votes are not counting, but would it not be better if the user got a message like “you have all ready voted” or something similar?.

Thanks

[petroski]

Yes, same here and same result – and I redid it over again with no satisfaction.

A couple of things to note.

When you create the bbpress sub-folder within the wordpress folder, one needs to make the bbpress (or forum, etc.) folder writable so that the install can write the bb-config.php file.

I also note that the install (v. 1.02) created the no-longer-used folders my-plugins and my-templates, which I believe is a remnant from older versions, with apache permissions – meaning that I’ll need to telnet in and remove these from the command-line – something that the average wordpress user would like to avoid.

In looking around at what’s going on with BBPress and WordPress integration; my comment is that I primarily deploy WordPress as a CMS solution so my vote is for integration as a short code plug-in for WordPress. I also see the need for BBPress as a stand alone application – perhaps a fork in the road is the best solution?

[paulhawke]

@Michael R – I am creating an admin page to let you change the voting text – it will let you say whatever you like. Out of the box, it will say “Add your vote of thanks”, and “# said thanks for this post”. The admin page will let you purge all votes, choose if you want the thanks div to appear before or after the actual post (to aid in CSS styling) and some prefix / suffix suffix text (to aid in CSS styling).

Note: if you enable the plugin you will need to tweak the CSS of your forum template to style it. That goes way beyond the scope of the actual plugin itself though!

[paulhawke]

I spent a little while looking at this at the weekend. There’s a nice ‘action’ that I can hook into for generating the voting links and output. A little more tweaking on the back-end (AJAX processing of votes) and I’ll be ready to let this out for a beta test.

[johnhiler]

It looks like someone has built a *press module/plugin of some sort which allows users to vote on compatibility:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

But nothing like that exists on the bbPress plugins side of things.

The bbPress Plugins install actually has a separate signin cookie from the forums – even if you’re signed in on the forum side of things, you won’t be signed in here:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/

Plus, the “stats” tab has been “Coming Soon” for at least two years:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/delete-all-bozos/stats/

All these things exist on the WordPress side of things, so I’m guessing it’s a matter of lack of resources and/or a lack of prioritization.

[paulhawke]

I’ve seen this in other forums – rather than scrolling the topic with lots of new posts saying “wow, thanks man, that link was exactly what I needed.” people can opt to click a button/link on a post to register a “thumbs-up” / “vote of thanks”.

The template would then present these “thank you” votes in some form – perhaps a bar across the footer, or just below a given post, or in the meta-information somewhere. The presentation could be a simple count (“35 people said thanks for this post”) or maybe a list of names.

Putting the “thank you” bar between posts lends itself to the forums that host ads in that space also. In most bbPress themes, I’d (personally) add the thanks message in summarized form to the space left of the post, under the poster’s name.

It wouldnt be hard to collect the data (in the post_meta) table, or to add a link to add my vote of thanks to a given post. The challenge would be to modify the various themes – to “thanks enable” them – to display it correctly somewhere.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m really confused. I’ve read the IRC chat meetings (not sure why it took 13 days to post them but anyway), and I have to say that I’m really confused.

Right off the bat I hold my hands up to very little development outside of customising WordPress and writing BBpress plugins in the last 2 years, so this is all from a Project Management / BA perspective.

• Your 3 biggest tags from posts are: WordPress, Integration, Plugin.
• Every week, you have more posts on WordPress integrations thatn any other single topic.
• You advertise as one of your key features “wordpress integration”.
• You hold a poll to see what features people want, “wordpress integration” tops it. Infact it wins with 50% of the votes, or 520% more votes than its nearest competitor.

Now, seems to me, that the top priority in terms of new features, documentation and communication should be fairly obvious.

[21:28 GMT] <photomatt> 1. bug fixes

[21:29 GMT] <photomatt> 2. email notification

[21:29 GMT] <photomatt> 3. anon comments from filosofo

And obviously that’s… Email notifications? No… wait… Anonymous Comments?

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

From a Project Management standpoint, here’s the problem:

• BBpress0.9 has both of these features as working plugins. But it cant integrate with WordPress.
• BBpress1.0.2 doesn’t have these features, but can integate with WordPress. (Can anyone confirm that 1.0.2 integrates with 2.9.1 out of the box? – I can’t get it to work)
• So now we’re working on BBpress1.1 which will have these 2 very important features working but may or may not integrate with WordPress.

If BBpress 1.1 doesn’t integrate with WP2.9.1 (or the latest point release at the time of BBpress1.1’s release) or heaven forbid WordPress 3.0… then it’s exactly the same position as BBpress0.9 – just two years down the line and with less plugins working. We’ll have features we had 2 years ago and still not be able to integrate BBpress and WP. All we’ll have done is move 2 plugins into the core – and that’s really all we’ll have done in 2 years.

I’m not quite sure if this analogy fits across the world but in PMI terms (and I think Prince2 if you’re a European like myself) this is called “building a House on Sand”. Adding a turret aint going to help when the tide comes in (or a new version of WP is released).

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

If I move this away from features a minute (as everyone wants different features and I want to make this an abstract point not a specific one).

When will BBpress1.1 be ready?

I’m not looking for an exact date, we all know that’s impossible for any project like this, but roughly when will it be ready – any good PM knows this.

If there’s no bugs, and email subscription is working, that leaves Anonymous Comments to convert, +testing + release etc. Either way, I’m sure Matt has a rough idea in his head about how long until 1.1, even if it’s a ballpark figure. (Matt, im not expecting you to give us even a rough date as people will only keep you to it, and that’s not the sort of pressure you need right now/at all).

So, when is WordPress 3.0 coming out? What is the likely-hood, given both WP and BBpress’ history, that any existing integration will no longer work with WP3.0? Would it be too pessimistic to think its at least 50/50 that it’ll break?Is it too optomistic to think its 100% likely to work first time?

If we take the best case scenario, that BBpress1.0.2 works seamlessly with WP2.8, WP2.9 & WP3.0 and that BBpress1.1 works seamlessly with WP2.9 & WP3.0 – what’s going to happen to BBpress once we hit 1.1? Matt’s the sole developer, and there’s no way he’s not going to be involved in some format in WP3.0 not to mention all the WordPress Camps and the usual stuff.

It either means that BBpress gets handed over to someone else (again), or there’s a large amount of time between BBpress 1.1 and BBpress1.2 as WP3.0 has to be developed and released in between them. Given that BBpress1.1 is effectively cosmetic (2 features with used to work now working again), are we seriously looking at over a year between releases with new functionality?

And that’s the best case scenario!

Even if BBpress 1.1 does integrate nicely with 2.9, what if it doesn’t integrate with WP3.0? Are we going to get a patch or a plugin for BBpress 1.1 to make it work with WP3.0 if it doesn’t integrate? Will BBpress integration be Matt’s priority once WP3.0 comes out, given that 1) heck its not a priority now and 2) the plan is to make BBpress a Canonical Plugin from 1.2(-ish) ?

[21:26 GMT] <photomatt> bbPress will definitely be a WP plugin

[21:26 GMT] <photomatt> but don’t want to change the data structure decision until 1.2-ish

No, if BBpress 1.02 or BBpress1.1 don’t integrate with WP2.9 or WP3.0 is Matt or Automattic (cos i’m not wanting to pin this on Matt the person) going to suddenly reverse its decision and make BBpress integration a company priority? Of course not, that makes no sense.

Realistically, its integrate it now, or accept it ain’t going to be integrated.

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

This post looks rather doom and gloom, and I’m sorry for that, it’s not my intention. Here is my intention: Any Project Manager worth his/her salt would look at the above scenario with scepticism/fear/consider-quitting

Spending time developing software to hit a target that has 1) moved since first developed (WP2.7 -> WP2.9) and 2) will move again (WP2.9->WP3.0) soon after the software is released is, respectfully, lunacy.

This madness is then going to be compounded by rewriting the software in less than 6 months time? Then what is the upside/point of BBpress1.1?

The return of 2 features? The galvanising of the forum? BBpress has bloated in size since 0.9, moved away from what it was originally coded for, and lost useful functionality in the process. Going further down this path simply to rewrite it (mostly) as a WP plugin after 3.0 is out defies logic.

The only upside is if you can guarantee that BBpress1.1 can integrate with the latest version of WP and the release after that. Otherwise we’re developing software that has a shelf life of 3-4 months at most. Of course that can’t be guaranteed as WordPress Integration isn’t being worked into BBpress1.1.

If WP3.0 is being worked upon just now, if its in the early Project Management / Scoping stages, why isn’t the idea mooted that BBpress be reworked now as a Canonical Plugin?

The people that use BBpress now, for the most part, aren’t going anywhere. If we’re here now, we’re locked in to its current form – and we’ve already had to accept that keeping our system secure by keeping up to date with WP is not going to happen, we’ve accepted the last 6 months-ish of no updates.

BBpress’s major setback has been the fact that it’s on a different release cycle to WordPress and that integration has never been easy, simple, straightforward and infact that integration documentation has never been written.

By developing BBpress1.1 independent of WP3.0, we confine ourselves to a project that promotes itself with one major selling point that it doesn’t live up to; not to mention waste development time and turn people away from the project.

The BBpress project is/”was 6 weeks ago” at its lowest point, development had stalled for 6 months, the developer had quit, moderators had quit, plugin developers had quit, integration doesn’t work, plugins don’t work, information on the website is hideously wrong/out of date/wrong/misleading/wrong, the documentation website is now a porn links website etc etc etc.

From a PM/BA point of view, that’s the perfect time to start scoping and moulding the software to where you want to take it.

Hold up your hands and say “sorry its gotten like this, we dropped the ball, lets do this in a way we wanted to”. Don’t be tied into the same mistakes by chasing the dragon of “just one more release then we’ll fix integration”.

If you want BBpress to be a WP plugin, now is the time to develop for that. Take the code that works and run with it, don’t let history repeat itself with the idea of adding more and more to paper over the cracks – when WP updates or Plugins don’t work those cracks are very obvious.

<br />

WP:---2.3

2.5

2.6

2.7

2.8

2.9

3.0?

<br />

BB:

0.9

1.0a

1.0

1.1?

1.2?<br />

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayana

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

Matt,

please please please read your own blogs: Setting Scope

What’s our proposal? We take a page from the world of project management and we make a project plan before we jump into the dev cycle.

As an open source project, we accomplish more when we work together than we do following individual agendas, and we need to keep our project focused on commonly-agreed-upon goals instead of following tangents…

Surely, as i stated at the start, the commonly agreed goal is WordPress Integration:

• Your 3 biggest tags from posts are: WordPress, Integration, Plugin.
• Every week, you have more posts on WordPress integrations thatn any other single topic.
• You advertise as one of your key features “wordpress integration”.
• You hold a poll to see what features people want, “wordpress integration” tops it. Infact it wins with 50% of the votes, or 520% more votes than its nearest competitor.

While “instead of following tangents whenever a community member starts to take us on one, regardless of whether it’s to follow a cool idea that everyone loves” is:

• email notification
• Anonymous Posting

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

Thank you all for reading, i know its not a short post,

Take care.

[gerikg]

Thanks!

Wow, I never paid attention to the “blog” section. Same discussion that’s going on here.

I think just pulling one of the top requests out of a hat and just start working instead of the constant babble. I think the end result will be the users will be happy even if they didn’t vote on it. I really wish I can help aside from just requesting stuff. I don’t know PHP just have ideas.

That’s 1600 EST right or am I doing it wrong?

[Dailytalker]

“Please vote for features which aren’t available yet”

There is only a Tinymce-Editor available but its not compatible with the current bbpress-edition and its not what I am looking for. bbpress should use exactly the same editor as it’s used in wordpress. This would be a further integration step. It is not really nice to use 2 different editors for the forum and for the blog. Therefore please vote for WYSIWYG-EDITOR. The WYSIWYG-EDITOR should contain buttons for links and pictures

Please also vote for FACEBOOK-CONNECT. (The OPEN-ID Plugin does not work with the current bbpress-version and it doesn’t offer facebook-connect as the author is waiting till facebook will join the open-id-project. This may be in 2 years which is a very long time.