[mimbelli]

I’m currently managing a IPB 3.X forum with about 300 users and 20k posts. I have also a huge website with hundreds of articles. For several reason I would like to move away from IPB and I’m considering BBPress to manage in one way forum and website.
I would like to test a migration on a test site in the next few weeks. In the meantime I have some questions.

– Coming from IPB, what are the minimum essential plugins I need to get similar features?

– Which kind of integration I get between web site and forum? Could I share content each way?
I mean: a new article become a forum topic and a forum topic become an article.

– is BBPress still actively developed? Not to be polemic but looking at latest commit count and contributors it seems an alarming situation.

Thank you in advance

[Pascal Casier]

Hi,
Some answers from my side:
– I don’t know IPB, so no idea what’s in there, but for almost everything there is somewhere a plugin available
– website and forum share users and the environment. Again with plugins a lot can be done (e.g. my bbP Move Topics is doing one switch from one to the other and soon also the other way around)
– version 2.6 is coming out very very soon, so yes, it’s still alive ! If you want to do a test, go for 2.6 immediately on https://bbpress.org/download/

Pascal.

[mimbelli]

Thank you for your reply,

I’m just trying to understand if I can get a forum like phpBB or similar out of the box. i see there is a plugin for everything but I’m becoming crazy to understand what I need. I don’t find a list of basic features.
In my previous experiences having a lot of third party plugins installed proved to be a nightmare when upgrading and after some year some of them are not maintaned anymore.

I’m reading as much as possible through the forum but I cannot find a lot of info.

Where I find a list of features of the upcoming version 2.6?
Just to understand if some plugins/features has been implemented into bbp core.

Thank you in advance

[mimbelli]

As I said I’m a WP newbie trying to understand how everything works. These are my considerations so far. I do not want to hurt anybody.

After a couple of days of testing I’m really going insane trying to get a minimum acceptable installation.
While I understand that acceptable is a moot concept, I mean “similar classic feature of all free forum scripts out there” I’m not speaking about cutting edge features but really standard forum features since phpBB 2 hence:

• extended user profile
• private messaging
• user signature
• post count and join date below username
• post preview
• attachments with inline images
• quote replies
• report
• sticky, new, hot for topics
• view unread content

Now I understand that all of them can be obtained through 10 different plugins but I’m really scared to do so for these reasons:

• 10 different plugins and authors are very difficult to maintain. Chances something screw up are high, no matter how godd is the code.
• some of plugins implementing above features seems already nearly abandoned
• In one of my past life I was so naive to dope my Joomla installation with several third party mambot/plugins. When I had to upgrade I discovered that several of them where abandoned giving me a hege PITA to upgrade
• In a recent life I avoided to dope my IP Board installation with plugins but during a main upgrade I had the same problem with some mods I made by myself

Now I’m trying to bring everything to wordpress + bbpress but I see that it is a steep climb just to get what in 2016 is considered a forum with basic features. I’m not a developer otherwise I was already coding the missing pieces.

Please: less plugins – more core features

[Robkk]

@mimbelli Here is the list of plugins, these could be about 7 plugins in total if you want to do the free route, or 4 plugins in total if you only want to use BuddyPress and GD bbPress toolbox (paid plugin)

• extended user profile – BuddyPress (also able to add more social network type features)
• private messaging – Front End PM/bbp-messages/BuddyPress
• user signature – GD bbPress tools/custom code using user description from user profile, or x profile field from BuddyPress
• attachments with inline images – Image upload for bbPress
• quote replies – GD bbPress tools
• report – bbPress report content
• view unread content – bbPress pencil unread

User signature, hot/new/sticky topics (labels/icons??), post count and join date, visual preview could be possible using a small piece of custom code and using bbPress hooks to display them.