The shorter the better IMO. How about six months?
That should be enough time for people to sort out their plugins. _CK_ posted somewhere that their plugins will be updated in November (I think) and since a huge proportion of the most popular plugins are by them I’d be inclined to base the date on that.
You don’t want to end up in a similar rut to how WordPress ended up supporting the 2.0 branch for a stupidly long period of time despite nearly no one actually using it.
I actually said December, not November, at the soonest for my plugins to start supporting 1.0 officially.
I think 0.9 should have security releases indefinitely, at least for another year.
December 2010 would be a good retire date IMHO.
But I certainly don’t expect 0.9 to be given new features at this point.
Some people simply won’t be able to use 1.0 on shared hosts with several plugins. Their host will terminate their account for excessive resource use if there are bursts of activity at certain times of the day. So 0.9 will be their only option (or switching to lighter software).
ps. the 2.0 branch of WordPress was it’s best version 
I think 0.9 should have security releases until the end of next year.
Its a long time, and i can see why it would be a pain and an overhead when people are working so hard on 1.0, the realism is that 0.9 is a proven entity and alot of people will not be convinced to move a forum that’s already working well to something new, at least not in the short term.
Yes December 2010 is 18 months away, and that’s at Sam’s upper limit, but its not that long in development time; and given there is no new features going to be implemented for 0.9 only security fixes (and most of the probable new security holes in 1.0 wont be in 0.9).
@ryanhellyer
If you’re suggesting that Sam base the date of not supporting 0.9 on the proposed date that _ck_ might update all her plugins to 1.0 on, then you’re nuts. In a nice way ofc, but totally mental.
What if _ck_ doesn’t update for addons in december? There’s a plethora of reasons why that wouldn’t happen, and to base the proposed date of closure of 0.9 on a commented that _ck_ made on one forum post once seems… daft.
The end of next year sounds good to me too. I’m willing to support 0.9 questions in the forums in the meantime…
Some people simply won’t be able to use 1.0 on shared hosts with several plugins. Their host will terminate their account for excessive resource use
WordPress is much more resource heavy than bbPress in this regard. This is the only place I think we might have a use for an output caching plugin like wp-super-cache.
Poll added to first post.
It seems to me that what we have here, albeit with lots of talented helpers, is a ‘marriage in code’ between Sam and _ck_. He built the house, she makes it pretty. Almost all of the useful plugins are _ck_ home grown or have contributions from her. I can’t contribute in any hugely useful way, but love your baby nonetheless.
Seems to me like it’s essentially up to the two of you, when it comes down to it.
bbPress has several fathers. 
Matt did a lot of the early work… and Michael (mdawaffe) took over for a while too:
https://trac.bbpress.org/report/6
If you’re suggesting that Sam base the date of not supporting 0.9 on the proposed date that _ck_ might update all her plugins to 1.0 on, then you’re nuts. In a nice way ofc, but totally mental.
What if _ck_ doesn’t update for addons in december? There’s a plethora of reasons why that wouldn’t happen, and to base the proposed date of closure of 0.9 on a commented that _ck_ made on one forum post once seems… daft.
I’m not daft, I just didn’t remember correctly. I even added “I think” in brackets with my comment because I knew it was possible I had it wrong.
I thought _CK_ said they WOULD be updated by then, which is different from when they MIGHT be updated.
ps. the 2.0 branch of WordPress was it’s best version ,
No prizes for guessing who likes stable software then!
I’m quite used to the WP upgrade system now. I didn’t like the frequent upgrades in the beginning, but I’ve slowly realised that as long as I keep my plugins/themes up to date with the latest WP recommended approaches that any new updates are highly unlikely to affect them.
I also never liked the 0.9 branch very much. But I get the impression some of you are happy to keep using it for quite some time yet. I guess if someone can be bothered maintaining it then they may as well. I’ve had clients request for support for ancient WP plugins before and I try as hard as possible to get them to upgrade. Supporting out of date software is generally at the absolute bottom of my priority list.
I don’t see what the problem is here. If you like 1.0 and like bleeding edge, use 1.0
No one is asking for a single new feature in 0.9, just if there is a security issue found, release a fix. Such fixes usually take a trivial amount of time to produce once a problem emerges.
Some people who make money charging by the hour enjoy the idea of constant changes, upgrades, rebuilding things from scratch, etc. because it keeps them busy and in business. Other people have better things to do, and having made a significant investment in time to setup a working forum with bbPress over the past few years or they don’t have the extra performance required to run 1.0, can just give up all the new “features” in 1.0 and just keep using 0.9 while they plan a migration in their spare time.
All I am saying is if a security problem is found with 0.9 it should be addressed until the end of 2010. Based on WP and bbPress history that will probably happen once or twice a year. Otherwise feel free to let 0.9 gather dust.
Something else to consider is now that 1.0 is based on the WordPress core (ala BackPress) it is potentially vulnerable to any new attack vector that is found in WordPress (including at least one serious issue currently in the wild) while bbPress 0.9 might remain immune.
All I am saying is if a security problem is found with 0.9 it should be addressed until the end of 2010. Based on WP and bbPress history that will probably happen once or twice a year. Otherwise feel free to let 0.9 gather dust.
Given the development speed of bbPress (slow) this is not unreasonable. We seem to be fairly split between 6 and 18 months, and I’d split the diff at 12 months, if it comes down too it.
Ending things at a year end is much more tidy than the middle when many more people are away. Again, there’s zero hassle to Sam and the community if it remains until the end of next year.
If you push people off 0.9 in a hurry against their will, I bet you the top 100 sites will considering switching to other forum software if they run into significant hassle switching to 1.0 (it’s somewhat like the Windows Vista effect vs XP, the glossy interface to Vista does nothing over the functionality of XP, in fact it makes things run slower, so people waited until the next version)
While I think it’s nice Sam is asking the masses, the reality is the most vocal people here “in a rush” are running small sites with just dozens of members and hundreds of posts. The people he should be really asking are the largest sites with tens of thousands of members and hundreds of thousands of posts. But you won’t find them active here or voting because they typically have better things to do than constantly fiddle with the software.
My site is # 10 on the list of top sites, with just over 150k posts:
http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top100
I’m going to be staying on 0.9 for now. I’m not sure what to do about the upgrade path… I’m going to try 1.0 on some test servers, but so far I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade yet.
I’m all about back porting security BUT … 0.9 was a NON-STABLE release, and people seem to forget that.
In my opinion, people took the risk knowing they they were going to use a non-1.0 stable release in production … regardless of how long 0.9 was out.
So Sam, please minimize the amount of support for 0.9 with the idea being for you to spend more time focusing on 1.0+.
Again, this would be totally different if 0.9 was a stable release, but IT WAS NOT.
Just my 2 cents
Frooyo – What defines a stable release… whether or not it has a version 1.0 number on it?
I agree 100% with the comments of ryanhellyer & frooyo.
Been casually following bbPress for the past year (WordPress is sooooo a Gateway drug to other Automattic projects) but the impending release of 1.0 and the various RCs pushed me to finally jump in and start really fooling around with the software. Couldn’t be happier. God bless bbPress pioneers like _ck_, Sam, and everyone else for the plethora of killer plugins and themes.
Totally understand where people are coming from re: 1.0’s stability compared to 0.9 but it would be much more productive for attention to be focused on 1.0 instead of 0.9. After all, folks using/testing/tweaking 1.0 is how all the bugs, plugin compatibility, and various stability issues will be worked out!
Exciting times are ahead for bbPress and 1.0 is the future. The more focus on 1.0 the better in the grand scheme of things. I’m going to get razzed but 6 months doesn’t seem unreasonable (or even 3 months), especially since everyone has known for quite some time that 1.0 was going to be coming out. Let’s embrace the future: 1.0!
0.9 was the product of a few years of development and debugging 0.7 and 0.8
It powers several thousand forums. It’s stable.
1.0 is NOT just 0.9 with more bug fixes. It is a 50% different program with a 90 degree change of direction made suddenly by Matt deciding to make bbPress use the WordPress core (ala BackPress) in January 2008. It was re-engineered in just a year after a massive amount of work mostly by Sam. The alpha, beta and RC stages for 1.0 were rushed, apparently on purpose in some cases.
I don’t understand why this has to be a zero sum game. Why does version 0.9 have to be disparaged? I don’t mind if it’s criticized for technical reasons or for weak features… but to have its stability attacked is a real shock.
I will wait and see what Sam has to say about all this.
Ending things at a year end is much more tidy than the middle when many more people are away.
Except I feel that more people are off on Winter vacation in December But I’m not all that hung up on summer v. winter showdowns. I suspect the same volume of people will be away in December as July, so why not pull a GeoCities and shut down Oct 26th
The only real reason I can see for stopping 0.9 support is that it’s time consuming in a direction that’s no longer being followed (see _ck_’s explanation). And that’s fair, y’know
0.9 IS stable. It’s more tested than 1.0. But I agree with johnhiler, in that this doesn’t need to be a WarGames, zero-sum thing. There are always reasons to stay a couple revs back. Anyone who runs a server knows that. You want to upgrade to get new things, but you also end up holding off because it works as it, and you don’t want to mess with what works. But. There’s a point where holding off will cause you more pain when you have to upgrade.
Thankfully, we’re not there yet!
Sez Sam:
As long as bbPress 0.9 is maintained some time will have to be spent maintaining the 0.9 branch, mostly with regards to security fixes. I don’t see this as particularly burdensome, but I don’t want to be doing it forever.
12 to 18 months is long enough, IMO, for that. Pick one, carry on. A set in stone date is good so people can’t say they weren’t warned
0.9 was – and is – a stable release. The poll was meant to find out the level of demand on each timeframe. I think there is probably a reasonable cohort asking for support up to the end of 2010, so I’m prepared to maintain security fixes on the 0.9 legacy branch until then – this will however rely on proactive reporting from users of 0.9 as I won’t really be using it at all within a couple of months.
People contributing peer support on these forums can make the choice personally whether or not they help out with 0.9 problems. I’ll also provide a link to the latest 0.9 “legacy” release on the downloads page (with warnings about discontinuing support).
So, I’m thinking that support continues until 31 December, 2010. Anyone particularly unhappy about that?
It sounds like there are enough people wanting to keep using the 0.9 release (and apparently with good reasons) to justify continuing it longer than I suggested.
I never liked the 0.9 line, but it seems I’m not in the majority with that opinion. I guess I’m biased by requiring a working integration with WordPress.
Hey Ryan – It should be possible to integrate version 0.9 with just about any version of WordPress (including 2.7)… except for 2.8? That’s only broken because WordPress decided to change how they handled cookies and broke bbPress integration in the process…
It should be possible to integrate version 0.9 with just about any version of WordPress
Yeah, but it’s a lot easier with 1.0. I always found minor gremlins in the way it worked with 0.9, but with 1.0 it seems to function fairly seamlessly.
I generally help others with their forums, not build them for myself, so I need it to be fairly basic to do the integration. The way 1.0 does it natively is pretty slick IMO.
Ah ok, I was just wondering if there was an implication that 0.9 doesn’t have a working integration with WordPress! Thanks for clarifying.
I definitely agree that it’s not as seamless as it could be…
