[John James Jacoby]

Hey everyone! Guess what?

bbPress 2.6, Release Candidate 3, is now available for testing.

Download it from here: https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bbpress.2.6-rc-3.zip

Why is this cool? For starters, @jeffr0 may finally climb down off my back and stop giving me grief for how long it’s been since we shipped a major release.

bbPress 2.5.0 in 2014, 3 years ago.

Most people wouldn’t be proud to say that, but… I am. The 2.5 branch of bbPress has been so stable & well received, we were able to take our time with 2.6 and double-down on upstream improvements to WordPress.

bbPress 2.6 will come with:

* Per-forum moderators
* Improved favorites & subscriptions management
* Improved BuddyPress integration
* Performance improvements across the board
* UX improvements to meta-boxes and admin-area tools
* Tighter integration with WordPress’s Dashboard
* Template tweaks & clean-up
* About 110 other things

If you’re going to test 2.6 on a live site, maybe don’t just yet. It runs a database upgrade routine to migrate favorites & subscriptions from usermeta to postmeta, and for large forums that may take a while or possibly lock things up for a bit.

We are already running 2.6 here and on bbPress.org, so enjoy the speedier new posting experience, and we’ll let you know when the next beta is ready!