I’m looking to start up a book exchange for students at the university I attend. I want it to be very basic. People post the book along with some additional information (edition, price, condition, etc.) The posts would need to be searchable (of course), and there would have to be a way of viewing each department separately (for instance, just browsing the French books for sale).

I’ve been playing with Noah’s classifieds, and while it would work, I feel like I can do better. bbPress is very trim, which I like, and I’ve used wordpress a lot, which should be helpful. How well suited is bbPress for something like this?

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 5 months ago]

It’s possible to use it to power Classifieds like so (this is done with bbPress plus an adapted version of the Support Forum plugin together with the My Views plugins):

http://classifieds.weddingbee.com

However, as far as I know… it’s not currently easy to add all that meta info for each item – i.e. edition name, price, condition, etc. It’d be fairly straightforward to program a plugin to pull that off though! But it’s not currently available, as far as I’m aware…

[@_ck_ Participant 15 years, 5 months ago]

0.9 is very trim, 1.0 is technically as large as WP

Using topic meta you can store attributes for just about anything.

Searching it is another matter, you’d have to write some custom routines.

It all comes down to how much PHP you know or if you can pay a developer.

bbPress can do a great deal, but sometimes there are apps that can do better, don’t try to hammer a square peg into a round hole.