[OC2PS]

JJJ:

I have a question about an architectural decision. I ask not to question your judgement, but truly out of curiosity and to understand your thought process behind the decisions.

If I understand correctly, forums, topics and replies are each custom post types. I have been wondering what relative advantages/disadvantages this model might have vis-a-vis say the following:

forums – custom taxonomies

topics – custom posts

replies – comments for the custom posts

[John James Jacoby]

* Taxonomies don’t have metadata, to allow for topic & replies counts or latest content

* Comments don’t allow for attachments without some major work

* The API for custom post types is farther along, more robust, and provided a relatively quick head start (see above)

[Rahul Bansal]

@John

First I want to thank you for bbPress as I use it a lot. 🙂

I had same question like OC2PS from long time and after reading your answers, I still feel an urge to take this discussion ahead. IMHO what OC2PS suggested is intuitive.

With references to your answers:

> Taxonomies don’t have metadata, to allow for topic & replies counts or latest content

(Not one of best suggestion) Taxonomy-meta can be stored in an extra mysql-table. I wish like many other this to be part of WordPress core though (ref)

Once we accept overhead of extra DB table, other things seems easy.

> Comments don’t allow for attachments without some major work

Comments already have commentmeta. May be we can use it to store array of attachment_id.

Off-topic – By the way I did not find attachments support in bbPress out of the box? I am using a bbPress plugin for that. Am I missing something here?

> The API for custom post types is farther along…

Agree. 🙂

Post-revision is an example which I guess used internally to track edits to replies.

==

While the outcome bbPress is good in reality, it just feels off-beat to have 3 custom-posts.

IMHO, going with 1 custom-post+commets+custom-taxonomy way might have made themeing part easier…