[deadlyhifi]

Just spotted the foliowing on Twitter by @petemall:

bbPress plugin is born… http://trac.bbpress.org/changeset/2463

bbPress plugin is born… http://trac.bbpress.org/changeset/2463

— Pete Mall (@petemall) July 13, 2010

Not done any investigation yet…

[kevinjohngallagher]

Yutt,

Like everyone else, you’re entitled to your opinion; and i am truly sorry if i’ve left you with an overly negative one – though I apprecaite I am a tad less forgiving of people who can’t even get my name right

[johnhiler]

I completely support Automattic’s investment in a new WordPress forum plugin!

That said, I think it would avoid a lot of confusion if it were named something else besides “bbPress”.

[john010117]

My two cents (if it’s worth anything): Keep bbPress 1.1 and continue to maintain it. However, get a new dedicated group of developers to actively code and maintain a wordpress forum plugin (named differently like talkpress for example). And on both website’s front pages, specifically list the differences between bbPress and “talkPress” so people won’t get confused.

[John James Jacoby]

Again, just too many of the same points to repeat myself, but bbPress standalone isn’t going to be “unsupported”, it just isn’t going to see any additional features, which is exactly what I think most of you want. Correct me if I’m wrong here?

If I wasn’t on my iPad I’d quote myself volunteering personally to commit any bug fixes to the 1.1x branch of code if anything comes up, but again, that went totally unresponded to.

All of the things I’ve offered to do, to help continue the 1.1x branch of standalone code in addition to creating the 1.2 plugin, have gone totally unacknowledged. If you want to be able to do it yourself, you’ll need to have the experience to understand that the code you write is responsible for powering millions of sites around the world, and that you can easily create global chaos with one click of a button. Call me melodramatic, but in environments like WordPress.com, it’s very true. My experience over the past year has had me much more close to that kind of environment, particulalrly with BuddyPress.

A year ago I felt keeping bbPress as a standalone made sense because a year ago I didn’t comprehend what was coming in WordPress, particularly 3.0 where custom post types have made much more possible. I also had less experience with BackPress, and don’t get me wrong; BackPress is awesome, but bbPress won’t reach its full potential until it’s a plugin for 25 million other websites.

Kevinjohn, I’m sorry but you’ve got a knack for twisting words around and quoting things totally out of context. That’s not really fair, and I wouldn’t do it to you or anyone else so I’d appreciate the same.

I don’t get what you all want bbPress to do differently that would even require a new standalone version. I’ve asked that before, and there’s no answer; just frustration.

bbPress has always been an Automattic endorsed project, and considering without Matt it wouldn’t exist, or have a trac, an svn, or core developers thus far, it seems like he’s the one who’s earned the ability to make decisions on the future of the project. If you call me believing that to be true drinking that Kool Aid, I’m happy to do it because I believe Matt and Automattic and bbPress has earned that from me. If Matt wanted to abandon bbPress completely and close up shop, he could, and someone could graciously keep it alive by forking it. None of that stuff, should make anyone this upset.

My employment status or relationship with Automattic aside, I’m happy, blessed, and consider it a great privilege to have the trust of Automattic and the surrounding community to take this on, even if some of you don’t understand why it’s me, or why now, or why a plugin.

Regarding TalkPress, the main reason it’s named differently is to avoid the confusion people have with WordPress.org and WordPress.com. bbPress is the opensource forum software of choice for WordPress users. If any of you want to help the plugin work on top of backpress, patches welcome and I’m open to the idea. Otherwise, I’d wager 60% or more of the support questions regarding bbPress are incorporating it with WordPress. It’s been said in this topic already, but making it a plugin alleviates those issues, and still allows everyone to keep loving bbPress.

In all honesty, all this back and forth is tiring, and all it’s doing is taking the team of people that are here to help keep bbPress alive, and make us the enemy to the people that are just happy to see life again. That, and it’s taken our ability to communicate news to the bbPress community away from us, and instead forced us to try and put out this fire for the past 4 days.

Quite frankly, it all kinda sucks.

I get that the reality (for some of you) of switching bbPress to rely on WordPress instead of BackPress doesn’t sit well or even make sense, but I promise you it does. I might even have a trick that will help make the admin area a little more familiar. But 1.2 isn’t going to use BackPress anymore. Instead it’s going to use WordPress. bbPress itself is getting lighter, and we inherit all the eyes and updates that WordPress has had that BackPress hasn’t. That alone, if you ask me, is more than enough reason to be thankful for this move. If you need it super optimized, we’ll inherit all the caching plugins for WordPress. If you need bells and whistles, we get WP plugins. There is too much to gain, to not have bbPress be a WP plugin.

The existing standalone committers, are doing a great job already. There are very few trac tickets to work through in terms of bug fixes, and most of the enhancements would naturally get fixed by making it a plugin.

So… I want to say again, your passion and enthusiasm is something I want, and appreciate. If any of you are going to WordCamp Savannah, I’ll gladly discuss this over drinks and dinner. Whatever you need, I want to make it happen for you, but the name isn’t changing, Myself and the team are going to support the standalone with security updates as needed. Since I have commit access, I’m happy to commit fixes as needed because I’ve been trusted with that ability and I want everyone happy with a safe and functional piece of software, plugin or standalone.

I also, typed this out entirely on my iPad over the course of an hours worth of “leisure time.” if that doesn’t say you have my attention and commitment, I dunno what does.

[John James Jacoby]

_ck_… you’d rather let bbPress die than let it be reborn and successful as a plugin?

I didn’t expect that from one of bbPress’s most vocal supporters and longest standing contributing members.

That being said, I very much appreciate your volunteering to continue to maintain the 0.9 branch; I appreciate everyone that’s worked hard on the 1.1 branch; and I very much look forward to the success of the 1.2 branch.

[gswaim]

How about a little wisdom about now… somebody please close this post.

[_ck_]

_ck_… you’d rather let bbPress die than let it be reborn and successful as a plugin?

To clarify, I’d rather see the name “bbPress” be retired than recycle the name for another purpose when there are years of development and history already in existence.

I have no problem with you/automattic/whomever making a new forum program, zero problem with it and I honestly wish you the best.

My problem is calling it “bbPress” when it has virtually nothing to do with the original bbPress project. Even worse, it’s being called bbPress 1.2 which is downright weird. 1.2 implies updates to 1.1 – but this is a complete rewrite into something else.

The only reasons I can conclude why it’s being called bbPress is because Automattic/Matt already owns the name, and y’all can’t think of another name or simply don’t want to bother.

Like I said before, and feel it’s worthy of explaining again: What if the WordPress core was suddenly completely re-invented on a whim, breaking all compatibility, and it was simply called “WordPress 3.1”. Wouldn’t that be really dumbfounding and confusing to the community?

@gswaim – the reason why this topic isn’t being closed, is because this is the most conversation we’ve EVER had about bbPress’s future/politics. Even during the backPress changeover we had nothing really like this, just bits and pieces. Matt would make a decision and we’d hear about it a month later during an interview or speech.

I believe this talk/venting is good and healthy as long as it’s not done by attacking individuals personally.

And I’d rather see it all focused here in this topic than a dozen topics eventually created on the subject, (especially since after all these years we still do not have a topic merge function in the api).

But if you want it closed in the hopes it will end people’s feelings on the subject, that’s not really how people behave/think is it?

[wtfmatt]

@_ck_

Is Matt planning to just “nuke” all the existing content on bbPress.org ?

That’s what I’ve been saying for friggin 3 months.

Why do the biggest plugin devs here keep wasting hours/weeks/years dealing with Matt and his falsely-seeming-reasonable “team”?

THEY DONT CARE ABOUT YOU.

Who is ready to fork this community into a standalone project for Christ’s sake? Why the hesitation people? I know you aren’t lazy. So what is it exactly… you are trying to be political here? Screw that. And screw Matt.

[_ck_]

Cursing/insulting Matt doesn’t help anything and is silly.

Matt’s actually a really nice guy from what I have read and heard. If he would ever have a vegan meal instead of all that meat, I’d even have lunch with him. He was one of the first and few people to donate towards a replacement monitor when mine failed.

I just disagree, strongly in some cases, with his decisions that seem to be done rather suddenly with little or no input from others, that radically affect a great many people. I disagree heavily with the concept of “code sprints” that he seems to like so much and most especially shoving in “features” into the core that should be plugins.

As far as forking, you have no idea what you are asking. It’s a ton of work and responsibility. Anyone can fork, but we’d run into exactly the same problems, who owns the domain, who owns the project name, who owns/operates the servers, are major decisions done by one person or by the community, etc. You are basically asking someone else to do the work for you, for free. If you want a fork, hire a coder and fork it, you don’t need anyone’s permission.

[johnhiler]

“I don’t get what you all want bbPress to do differently that would even require a new standalone version. I’ve asked that before, and there’s no answer; just frustration.”

I thought there were several pretty solid answers above, but I’ll give my take here. For me, it’s mostly about performance. bbPress (especially the 0.9 branch) is fairly fast. As the bbPress frontpage puts it, “bbPress is lean, mean and ready to take on any job you throw at it.” I agree!

WordPress is powerful and has many fantastic plugins and themes. But I don’t think many people would argue that it is lean and mean. It requires caching in order to have a reasonable number of queries and/or loading time.

When someone asks me if they should use WordPress, I always recommend they use a heavyweight hosting package. With bbPress, this hasn’t been the case. Now with a plugin version, that will change.

In any case, I’m not your target audience: I use bbPress to run larger sites. Most people who want a forum will have small forums. They will be perfectly happy with a bbPress plugin – in fact, happier because it will be easier to integrate.

But it won’t scale easily without lots of caching and expensive hardware. That’s why I prefer a standalone.

“In all honesty, all this back and forth is tiring, and all it’s doing is taking the team of people that are here to help keep bbPress alive, and make us the enemy to the people that are just happy to see life again. That, and it’s taken our ability to communicate news to the bbPress community away from us, and instead forced us to try and put out this fire for the past 4 days.”

I totally respect your right to take bbPress and “buddyPress” it into a WordPress plugin. My only request has been to use a different name.

[John James Jacoby]

@gswaim If it comes down to name calling or aggression, that’s always an option, but usually the last one if we can all help it. Fortunately the moderation team over here is fantastic, so no worries there.

The decision to allow Pete and myself the opportunity to do the bbPress plugin conversion wasn’t only Matt’s to make, and was agreed on by a committee of all of our peers running the 3.org initiatives, in #wordpress-dev on freenode, and on the WordPress development blog.

The reason it’s bbPress 1.2 rather than bbPress 2.0 (at least as it stands today) is because part of the coding standards we adhere to is not inflating version numbers. Could always see if everyone agrees to inflate based on the amount of new code going in, but I don’t think that’s my decision to make, and I would wager that it’s unlikely to happen? Been wrong before though.

[Matt Mullenweg]

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good / Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PipX3l1tEeU

I’m sorry if anyone feels surprised by the roadmap of having bbPress start to become a WordPress “core plugin” in the 1.2 timeframe, it was discussed (and posted to the blog) in the December 9th and 30th meetups, to a healthy debate that raised some of the same issues that have been brought up here.

It breaks my heart to see JJJ and PeteMall who are just getting started have to absorb the negative energy for 5-6 years of decisions they had nothing to do with so if like “wtfmatt” above you want to ascribe all of that to me I’m happy to bear the brunt of it. Let’s let them experiment, try something new, and see what happens. Then we can channel our worries (oh noes, this will break everything!) into positive outcome (you forgot an action in the template which breaks my plugin, here’s a two-line patch to fix backward compatibility).

We have to be careful with our words because they can have a demotivating effect beyond what you can know, which could stagnate bbPress’ development (again).

Finally, there is obviously some pent-up umbrage over many decisions that have been made in the history of bbPress, and I think it would be healthy to talk about those and do a post-mortem to see what we can learn from them. However this thread has already become tainted, and we don’t have message threading here, so it’d probably be best to start a new thread per issue. Tag it with “formatt” and I promise I’ll reply as thoughtfully as I can.

It’s a Sunday but I’m here again. Despite everything bbPress holds a special place in my heart as it was the first project I wrote from scratch applying everything I had learned from working on b2 née WordPress.