In case you didn’t it’s up on the WordPress 3.0 launch post – scroll down a bit.

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

If you work with WordPress in addition to bbPress I urge you to check it out. You’ll get alot of insight into how Matt sees things going in the future and how they (Automatic) approach open source.

If you don’t work with WordPress I still urge you to check it out! Towards the end a woman asks a question about the state of bbPress. He answers very frankly and cites these very forums.

I know there are many people on these forums right now that are not thrilled with Matt and Automatic’s handling of bbPress over the past year or so. For me his comments in this video really puts things in perspective and I now feel very good about the future of bbPress.

Earlier in the video Matt discusses how the WordPress team is planning on trying something new and releasing what he calls “core plugins” for WordPress 3 – basically large scale plugins that add powerful functionality and are officially supported by Automatic. I foresee bbPress becoming one such plugin.

Anyways enough of me telling you about it, go watch the video!

[@rootside Member 14 years, 6 months ago]

You’re wanting to compare an unsupported, unintentional, unadvisable, found-by-mistake hack (that doesn’t always work) against a theoretical piece of software. It’s a no-brainer which will compare favourably.

Yeah well, exactly.

The comparison you propose might be fair when it comes to judging pure performance, but a “normal” integration doesn’t give you what you and your users should expect:

Common elements like a header, a navigation and other functions should be available and work the same across the whole site without you having to mimic them for a forum section, changes you might make to those elements shouldn’t have to be made twice, and if you get a single admin panel at the backend on top of all that, then that theoretical piece of software becomes extremely desirable.

Proper integration, if I may call it that, is an absolute requirement in my opinion, because a forum is always just one component of a larger website in what I do, and I’d be surprised if that didn’t apply to many people here. It then becomes a different problem, of course: is the loss of performance on my forum pages acceptable, does it scale (does it blend , what kind of hosting would I need to run things smoothly etc.? That’s kind of what I’m trying to feel out, and I just have the feeling that a plugin wouldn’t do such a bad job, all things considered.

Fully agree with your point that Matt is the one who would have to get things moving after basically announcing that this is going to happen.