[kriskl]

Hi!

maybe it was already discussed, but it has occurred to me (as a newbie without programming skills)

we all know plugins need updating, or developing to make bbpress more functional

so, my idea is, instead of paying some developers privately to make our forums works, to fix this or that plugin,

it would be better to pay from this forum, to do it and they could package these plugins for everyone to share!

it was a sad news re _ck_ and donations.. or rather lack of them, but maybe my idea would work better?

we all need work done, and sometime we have to pay someone anyways, but at least this way community could benefit

Kind regards

Kris

[kevinjohngallagher]

Personally,

i doubt _ck_’s main reason for leaving the project was money – she just wasn’t that sort of person. She’d thrown so much time and effort into a project that had gone off at a tangent to what it set out to do, and then its lead developer (actually, only developer) quit. _ck_ was basically left holding the bag, and (again, my own opinion) it may have appeared to her that things weren’t going to change for the better any time soon.

Your idea’s a lovely one, but a little impractical. Given the lack of documentation, huge changes to the codebase, and amount of hardcoded outputs – writing any sort of plugin for BBpress easily becomes somewhat of a quagmire. It gets to the stage where the cost (in terms of time) for developing the plugin would be huge, and i’m not sure that donations from the board are ever going to come close to matching that.

A slightly modified suggestion, is that if someone pays for a developer to edit/fix/create something for their own BBpress installation, then they could donate that code to the site. That’d be far more likely to produce tangible results.

Merry Christmas

[grassrootspa]

@kriskl:

I like where are going. Perhaps you are on to something. Building off your initial idea, what about some sort of 2010 plugin development contest?

As you noted, several people here chipped into _ck_ and got their money returned. I’m sure those same people might be open to something like this.

Heck, if we had some ‘bbPress plugin contest’ I’ll chip in something.

Anyone else like have any thoughts on this? Would anyone else be willing to donate toward a bbPress plugin development contest?

If we can get 10 folks to match one another at $25 or $50 each we can get a small but sizable initial pot built.

The Sandbox development contest back in 2007 initially had $500 total to distribute between 1st, 2nd and 3rd place (http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2007/05/31/announcing-the-sandbox-designs-competition/) After some sponsorships the total in competition prizes rose to $1950. (http://sndbx.org/details/)

Look, the top prize is most likely not going to be a zillion bucks, but it its not a bad idea to stick a steroid shot in the plugin development arm and get some more people fired up (or fired up once again) about bbPress development.

Heck, even if someone took an existing plugin that didn’t work with bbPress 1.02 and updated it, this would be an improvement.

Perhaps this plugin contest could be scheduled/built around around the revamping/relaunching of the bbPress.org site and the introduction of the new bbPress codex section.

Thoughts? Anyone else willing to match a small donation toward such a contest? Haha, if people like this idea, the bbPress Theme contest comes next

[Ben L.]

As a plugin developer, I’m more than happy to help you with problems in existing plugins. If there’s a glitch, post it on the plugin’s page and someone will probably figure out a way to patch it.

[Michael]

Unfortunately, I am not a plugin developer – but I think the idea is good. At the end of the day, there might need to be a little ‘push’ to get bbPress active again. This could be it.