Hi, We’re new to this, so be gentle.

We’re looking at starting an on-line mag, with plenty of pages/articles and have gone a fair way down the road to populating our site, which is run on WordPress. We’d like to have an inbuilt forum as part of the features on the site, and want to encourage people to post on the forum, as opposed to the end of our articles (or blog posts). My question is, is there a limit to the amount of total members/members on line at any given time/forum topics that bbpress can handle?

Perhaps this won’t be an issue if we fall flat on our face. But, you know, we hope to be wildly successful and popular….

Also, does anyone reading this have blog with an inbuilt forum that you could post a link to, just so I can see how it comes together?

Thanks.

[@justin-mason Member 13 years, 3 months ago]

The forum software has been through several years of development. I’ve seen earlier versions of it used on high(er) traffic websites and it seems to do quite well.

The issue I’m running into is the lack of current version plugins for basic features, such as reply with quotes which seems to have last been updated like 4 years ago. I’m sure with BB2.0 and the integration between WP/BP/BB we should start to see some real life in this community. Vbulletin is great as a standalone board, but does not tie in well with wordpress.

Rule of thumb; Be sure to do lots of trial and error to make sure your plugins are working without issue before you go live on a production site.

[@anointed Participant 13 years, 3 months ago]

I managed to migrate a vbulletin site with 300k posts and 40k users to bbpress 2x and have no problems. I am running dedicated servers, but really don’t see much difference in the server load after switching the forums over. Overall bbpress 2x should scale just fine.

[@purplesky Member 13 years, 3 months ago]

Hello Anointed, may I ask what were your reasons for shifting from vbulletin to BBpress?

Im still investigating if I should go with BBpress or vbulletin, so it would help me decide if you dont mind,

thankyou.

[@anointed Participant 13 years, 3 months ago]

As a forum Vbulletin is miles ahead of BBPress at the moment. There is no comparing the two systems due to the shear number of plugins and addons available right now for vb.

However, BBPress has built everything around true WordPress standards which I am intimately familiar with. This makes building a custom forum solution much easier for me than what vb offers.

I was running a custom bridge setup to ‘hook’ together WordPress and Vbulletin. While this works great syncing users registration/login/etc there is no deep integration with the data side and frankly I didn’t feel like writing it.

Because BBPress stores everything in the WP db and standard formats, it makes it much easier to pull forum data into other templates than it is with vb.

(say I want a user profile page showing all users posts/topics/replies/custom post-types/etc.. very easy with BBPress)

Given enough time and energy, I don’t believe there is anything that vb does which wp can’t do better.

[@purplesky Member 13 years, 3 months ago]

Thankyou Anointed for all that information.

I notice you mention there is not much difference in server load…I presume BBpress uses less server load? May I ask what percentsge less?

[@anointed Participant 13 years, 3 months ago]

I have not done any ‘true’ stress testing as of yet. I’m actually waiting for a stress test plugin to be built to see real stats. (Not my area of expertise)

What I can say is that my server load is staying under 2, which is where it was with vb.

[@ksmithtn Member 13 years, 3 months ago]

Thanks for the info, anointed. Good to know it’s holding up.

Any advice on hosts… here’s my question/situation:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/hosting

[@sadr Participant 13 years, 3 months ago]

@Justin given the fact that this version of bbPress has practically nothing in common with bbPress 1.x and previous versions, you can’t really argue that 2.0 will work on high traffic sites because previous versions could. Version 1 and 2 also has completely different authors.

That said, the information anointed just shared sounds very promising indeed. While following the development of bbPress 2.0 from the start, I can safely say that performance has been one of the biggest concerns throughout. The developers were honest, and I was prepared to trade off some performance in favor of cleaner, seamless integration with WordPress.

With anointed successfully hosting 300k posts and 40k users on bbPress 2, I’m beyond pleased. Knowing it will only get better from here, the future is looking mighty bright.