I came by this talk about o2 recently, (the successor of the P2 theme, but now made as a plugin):

Flick through the slides for a quick summary.

So as I was listening to the feature set of this plugin, every single one of them turned out to be on my bbPress wishlist:
Native infinite scroll, improved front-end editor, drag & drop image uploads, JSON API, post by e-mail, cross-site search. It seemed to me like the goals of o2 and bbPress are very much aligned.

I guess I’m just wondering if the bbPress developers have been in touch with Beau Lebens & co at all? And could you perhaps shed some light on why o2 isn’t just being made as an extension of bbPress?

[@beaulebens Participant 11 years, 3 months ago]

I suppose there are a few reasons for this, but the most immediate are:

• Our primary goal is replacing our own internal communications platform (P2). That runs on WordPress.com, which runs WordPress, not bbPress (this is probably the biggest one).
• We (the team working on it) are more natively WordPress developers than bbPress specifically.
• Quite simply, we didn’t really think about it until we were already well along the way building it for WordPress.

There are no plans to do anything related to bbPress, but the code will be open source, so you’re welcome to take pieces and apply it to bbPress as well.

[@sadr Participant 11 years, 3 months ago]

Thank you very much for chiming in Beau. Your points make sense, except the first one has me a bit confused. o2 is going to be a plugin, like bbPress. So isn’t “WordPress.com runs WordPress, not o2” just as true?

the code will be open source, so you’re welcome to take pieces and apply it to bbPress as well.

I sincerely hope that will be feasible. Excitedly looking forward to seeing o2 in action!

[@beaulebens Participant 11 years, 3 months ago]

Yes, except that I work at Automattic (we run WP.com), so we can run whatever we want on WordPress.com. Getting bbPress working there would be a very different project from what we’re doing with o2.

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 3 months ago]

I also saw watched this stream from WordCamp SF 2013 and it looks quite cool.

The features as you mention @sadr share some similar goals I agree. Some people say why run a forum at all these days, why not just a blog with comments and a good theme. I think the same approach should probably apply here for O2 also. What does O2 do for you that a WP blog or bbP forum does not and will it fit my needs better than the current solutions available.

I would also love to see these same features you mention available either in bbPress or as plugins, sadly my coding skills just aren’t there to contribute such awesomeness. 😉

That all said if O2 is a plugin for available in the WordPress plugins directory I would hope O2 has support for custom post types then why would it not work with bbPress? (hack, hack, hack, see slide 62 “Template compatibility is hard”)

And I’ll leave with this:

Getting bbPress working there would be a very different project from what we’re doing with o2.

http://johnjamesjacoby.wordpress.com/forums/topic/bbpress-support/ 😉

[@anonymized-5853594 Inactive 11 years, 3 months ago]

I hope that because o2 turned into an plugin and not a new theme, the possibilities of combining the functions with bbPress should be possible.
Breathe works well and if other themes can be made to play nice with both plugins, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work.

I do think that bbPress can be a very valuable tool and won’t actually be replaced by comments altogether.
I hope that we’ll be able to test the plugin soon on our own installs. 🙂