Taking a look at bbPress 0.9
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What’s all missing in terms of features in 0.9 when we compare it to bbPress 1.0+ ?
- XMLRPC – but do we use it right now? I haven’t heard of anything using bbPress XMLRPC
- WordPress matching backend
What else? I never used 0.9 much. BTW, I think most of the functionality a forum owner would need are covered by _ck_’s plugins
I would like to hear from you guys.
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I have a WPMU install with an integrated forum. I ended up using 1.0+ with deep integration.
If my memory serves me one of the reasons was that 1.0 has display name support, but 0.9 doesn’t.
So do 1.x/WP users allow members to change their display name to “administrator” ?
Or to mimic the names of moderators?
But seriously – do people want display names because of lack of UTF8 support in user_login?
Because that’s easily fixable.
I’ve never liked display names, they are a really bad idea on an active forum where you cannot control the mental age or lack of social skills of some of the members.
While the WP backend is “pretty”, in WP it has to be because users are exposed to it for some crazy reason, and of course it breaks with the entire default theme of the site.
How much time do you spend in the admin section, does pretty really matter?
bbPress (standalone) solved the admin menu problem with users by making advanced profiles. Unfortunately bbPress (plugin) will revert right back to the WP problem.
That said, the admin section could be much more disconnected from the main program anyway, so it can be developed by different people at a different rate with different theme possibilities.
It might even be possible to “theme” the admin section like the regular site theme.
Thanks Greg and _ck_ for participating!
I totally agree with you on the admin section.
Adding a poll to the question, what would you like to see? A fork of v0.9 or v1.1
Here is the poll – http://poll.fm/239qh
_ck_
Moderator
Ben L.
Member
If I changed my display name to _ck_, I would still be marked as “Member”. I could change my name to administrator as well, but people on this site are used to seeing Name – Rank, not Rank – Member.
And if you’re going to bash 1.0 or 1.1, don’t do it because of added features. 1.0 added several security fixes (for example, try going to an admin page “admin-base.php?plugin=
[name of destructive function here]” in both 0.9 and 1.0. Only 0.9 executes the function._ck_, I could just as easily apply your arguments against display names to email, instant messaging, or IRC.
We don’t need a fork – bbPress standalone (which isn’t going to be discontinued until there’s a perfect converter to the plugin version) can easily be replaced with a WP install with only the bbPress on it.
But seriously – do people want display names because of lack of UTF8 support in user_login?
I find that people want display names for a few reasons:
- They like to have the same login name for websites
- They don’t want people to see/know their login name
- Their login name might be difficult as a username
- People are used to it from other forums. It’s no longer “standard” it’s a “baisc”.
Here’s an Real World example I dealt with today:
An MMO people playing forum, where people are displayed by their username, but they want to be displayed by their “character name”.
Here’s a Real World example I dealt with about a month ago:
A good willed American called Joh Mahone chooses the username “IrishMahone” for years, but when he joined one of my Irish Tourism boards, and gots abuse every time he posts. Thats because his username says “Irish My Ass” in Gaelic. This didn’t go down well.
So do 1.x/WP users allow members to change their display name to “administrator” ?
Or to mimic the names of moderators?
No, i’m sure there is a catch for this.
I’ve never liked display names, they are a really bad idea on an active forum where you cannot control the mental age or lack of social skills of some of the members.
True, and I’m all for worst case scenarios when coding; but surely it’s easier to put some kind of time lock on when or how often one can change their name? Or even have name changes approved? I’m just blurting ideas here – but if its something that people will miss when going from 1.0 to 0.9, then why don’t we think about a solution?
How much time do you spend in the admin section, does pretty really matter?
Pretty? no.
Usable? Hell yeah !!!
Sadly on my busier forums (moderation wise), the decision to upgrade from 0.9 to 1.0 was won over by the admin section. This is also true of bbPress installs for “less tech savy” users.
One of the things about your plugins _ck_ is that they mostly require people to open the file and manually edit. Thats not everyone’s cup of tea. Thats not to be disparaging of the method, or its reasons, but we’re at a stage now where people that come to forums expect an Admin UI and options to be there.
Also, and I think this is something tht no-ones said here, but if you think “bbPress, hear good things, lets look at this” and you download 0.9 and see THAT admin section and kakuemi theme, you’re not going to think “oh this looks good, modern andwell thought through” you’re going to think “awesome, i’m Marty McFly, my computer is a delorian, and i’ve landed in the 90s”.
We don’t need a fork –
bbPress standalone (which isn’t going to be discontinued until there’s a perfect converter to the plugin version)
Sweet, whats the time frame on this?
Because if this is way offin the future, then cool.
If this is this year, then it’s not.
The issue here is one of perspective, and we don’t have the data on this yet.
can easily be replaced with a WP install with only the bbPress on it
yeah, but some of us don’t want that…
If I changed my display name to _ck_, I would still be marked as “Member”
But if you change your name in “zaerl” and you put on my same avatar then you will look exactly like me (at first sight obviously, the profile page is different.)
I allow my users to use the display name and implicitly to have the same name/surname/nickname but I use a plugin that transform “The Display Name” to “The Display Name (the_login_name)” so these is no confusion. Also I use another plugin that prevent users for taking a list of display names like: Administrator, Moderator, Key Master etc.
Using display names versus login names is an ancient argument and there are pros and cons on each side. It is a user experience design decision that individual site owners will make.
_ck_, I agree display names have their drawbacks, but using the login name does too. For example:
– login names favor early joiners (which you may or may not want to do)
– login names have more restrictions (e.g. no spaces)
– login names are less “natural” in some types of community
– login names are more tricky to change
Display names have some additional drawbacks you didn’t mention
– confusion of two names for a member
I don’t think the spoofing is a real issue — like Ben says you can display the member role to avoid that. Two users CAN select the same display name, but people deal with duplicate names in real life all the time. The profile picture becomes more important though.
Personally, I think the argument in favor of display names gets stronger in proportion to the degree of community in your forum. So I wouldn’t use them on a support forum, but I would use them on an enthusiast site.
Long story, but I might switch back to 0.9 on one project if I can somehow get display name support.
IF I did use a fork, it would be 0.9 (to me this is an existing fork, not a new one) to get away from Backpress. This would be mostly for performance reasons and so I’ll be watching the db query count on the plugin version with interest.
The reason why many of my plugins require editing is because it’s usually a “set and forget” situation and nothing can top that for maximum performance. Some I just couldn’t be motivated to do all the work for an admin menu until I knew people were actually using it, and based on donations, virtually no-one is using my plugins or wants them improved.
Plus until I came up with an idea for external admin code, I hated how they were often larger than the plugin itself.
In any case admin menu frameworks can easily be changed. There were several plugins for WordPress 2.5 and earlier that reformatted all the menus, the design in WordPress today was lifted from those plugins directly.
The idea that there will be a “perfect” standalone to plugin converter is incredibly naive. It will convert data, all your plugins and themes will be dead.
In any case bbPress will definitely be forked, I am hoping there will be several forks.
ps. @Greg, Display Names can be “accessed” from bbPress 0.9 since they are just in the user metadata and autoload when the user is fetched, you just have no UI elements to set or change them from 0.9 (but if you have WP integrated, just use that). It would be easy to make a plugin that displayed the Display Name in bbpress.
Just like to add that I’m personally not terribly worried about the admin section UI. There are other more important things (perf, for example).
I NEVER write admin pages for my own plugins, but rather use a simple config file. I often think how nice it would be to have pretty admin pages, but it never gets to the top of the priority list because user features are more important.
_ck_, thanks. A year ago I really didn’t understand the code base very well so the 0.9 versus 1.0 decision wasn’t terribly well informed. And I think that if I went to 0.9 I would want to also get out of deep integration to get all of the perf benefits.
Now that I’ve written a bunch of custom plugins it is probably a simple thing to get all this working. As part of the user management model it does seem like something that is a core part of the system though.
BTW, one little complication is to add something along the lines of the way 1.0+ caches userdata with one big query before rendering all the individual topics (thereby avoiding individual queries for display name at each topic). The plugin would need to take care of this too.
Even 0.9 caches all user data, it’s not an issue.
0.9 is far more efficient than 1.x
If you don’t see 0.9 doing that, I must be using a mini-plugin to do it.
The Display Name will be “sucked in” along with all the userdata.
You can write a little plugin that when the user name is requested, it first checks to see if the display name is set and return that.
In fact I think there was an early plugin that did this for admin with 0.9, it had some issues but I remember I figured out some workaround. Vague memory now, it would have to be searched for.
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/display-name/
Be sure to read all the comments to find the last working version.
There are a lot of new tricks I’ve figured out over the years which would make such a plugin much better now, like not activating the filter until you are already inside the bbPress templates (ie. ‘bb_head’) so that the plugin does not step on internals like replacing user_login with the display name for urls, etc.
I NEVER write admin pages for my own plugins, but rather use a simple config file.
Same.
And I think that if I went to 0.9 I would want to also get out of deep integration to get all of the perf benefits.
It depends on what you need deep integration for. If it’s just to access a few WP functions, might be best to write your own functions that do the same thing in bbPress.
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The admin page, like everyone has said, could easily be themed.
One other thing… I was thinking of leveraging the XMLRPC support to enable publishing of posts from an iPhone app.
I guess I would have to find a different way to do this in 0.9.
My preferred solution: Login with an email address, and give the site administrator the option of allowing users to change their Display Name. The distinction between usernames and Display Names then ceases to exist. Nobody forgets an email address either.
@Dennis, good idea – though note bbPress 0.9 requires a plugin for login-by-email-address support (I think I wrote one, can’t remember).
By the way, I don’t think I released it yet but should by the end of the month, just have to write a “readme.txt” – I have a “rename user” plugin for bbPress to change user_login across the system.
It even supports multiple bbpress and wordpress systems attached to the same user db table and will fix all topics and wp comments.
So, not meant for constant username changes, but good for occasional fixes. Also detects existing username collisions.
That sounds very useful – look forward to seeing it.
I also like the login with email address option. Trade off there is that it becomes harder to switch the email address associated with the account. Probably a good trade though.
_ck_, do you remember how your plugin handled the paths where WP/BBP currently uses the login name? For example, the “_ck_” in…
$bb->email_login = true;There you go, instant feature!
lol Ben, that works for 1.x but not 0.9
in 0.9 you need this https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/email-login/
@Greg part of the workaround is to only perform the display name change on functions that do direct output themselves (the functions with echo) the internal functions that return strings should not be changed.
In reality the best way to approach it might be to only apply it on the portions of the topic page and profile page that show the names.
It’s not super simple but it can be done.
Building admin panels for themes and plugins are the same for 0.9v?
Don’t completely follow the question but the admin structure as far as actions and filters is very similar for 1.0 compared to 0.9 but the CSS is a little different.
You got it right!
_ck_, oh, I get it. You aren’t removing the login name and replacing it with the account email, you are just allowing users to log on using their email address.
So during registration users still need to provide a login name, and the path to their profile will always contain that login name.
Hmmm. I’m not sure whether that makes things easier or more complicated for the user.
User-Name-less systems like facebook need to be designed from scratch like that. The WordPress/bbPress system unfortunately is user_login/user_id based.
You could force user_id for the profile stub if that makes you like it better, bbPress will accept either.
BTW in a forum based system, how would you deal with two dozen users that insisted on using “Greg” as their display name and similar avatars?
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