So this will be another of my unpopular posts, i’ve had a whole week of working on bbPress, so this is my 3rd of the week – apologies to all.

It’ll really help this conversation if you read http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/future-of-bbpress#post-60022 which is written by the wonderful Andy Peatling who has integrated bbPress with BuddyPress (and therefore into WordPress). Basically, he is the authority on the matter.

I bring this up because I thought today, what the heck are we doing? WordPress integration is the single most asked for feature, it’s the reason a large number of people choose bbPress, and according to Matt:

Strategically the most important thing we need to figure out is how to integrate bbPress better with WP

-http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/future-of-bbpress

Ok, but if we look at what Andy has said, in order for this to happen we need to remove BackPress from bbPress. Except… 90% of the changes from bbPress0.9 to bbPress1.0 was adding BackPress.

So, if integration is the plan (even as a plugin), and integration = no backPress, then whatever platform we build the fully integrated bbPress out of is bbPress without BackPress, or as we commonly call it bbPress0.9.

So then why are we building on top of bbP1.0, when we’re going to have to port that code back to 0.9 in the future or worse, attempt to combine the two. Why are we focussing on features that are already in WordPress as standard, given that they will work as via the WP functions once integrated.

How far down the rabbit hole are we going to go before we take a slightly longer term look?

Anyone have any thoughts for a Friday evening?

[@paulhawke Member 14 years, 10 months ago]

“bbPress without backpress” is not the same as “bbPress 0.9”

In version 0.9 there was bbPress specific code to perform a variety of functions. Those method calls were migrated to use a sub-set of the WordPress codebase (“backpress”). That became version 1.0 … and what was done was to move from “a subset of WordPress” to “the whole of WordPress”.

A more accurate statement would therefore be that bbPress specific code was dropped, it moved to using WP features divorced of the rest of WP, and then was made to work with WP as a whole — a continuation of forward momentum and not a step backward at all.

[@johnhiler Member 14 years, 10 months ago]

I’m not really clear on the advantages of 1.0 using BackPress… it seemed like a huge amount of work, and I’m not clear at all on the benefits – especially since last I heard, the WordPress release wasn’t fully using BackPress yet.

Has that changed – are bbPress and WordPress using a shared BackPress codebase?