I’ve been looking for a solid forum software for quite some time now. vBulletin has a lot of features, but it’s too bloated…it’s “Web 1.0”

I explored Vanilla, EsoTalk, and now bbPress. I thought bbPress would be a good option, but it seems like the developer community has completely abandoned it over the past year. There are no themes, no plugins, and barely any updates to the core forum. As I kept looking for themes, I found this on bbShowcase:

The bbPress Showcase has been discontinued.

The removal of Sam Bauers and the halting of bbpress.org 2.0

was a clear and final sign that there is no interest in allowing

bbPress to become a mature, robust program and community.

By now bbPress 1.5 could have been in alpha but instead

bbPress development has been deliberately stagnated,

which should be a very alarming warning to everyone.

In addition, bbShowcase had only six donations in 2009,

which indicated to me there was no interest in my work.

My code will remain on bbpress.org as open source GPL

for those that wish to use it, however I caution you to

consider bbPress’s lack of leadership before continuing to use it.

Now I’m back at square one again. Not knowing which forum software to use.

[@michael888 Participant 15 years ago]

Hi Raize

bbPress is currently in that stage. There are a number of us who will be contributing to the new bbpress so that it will be a mature package.

See this link for more information about the starting steps of this make-over: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/help-out-with-bbpress

bbPress will take a while before it gets on it’s feet again – once it does, it’ll be great – competing with the likes of phpBB and SMF (vBulletin is out of the question as it is too ‘full’ of junk.)

I highly suggest using bbPress. I’m using it here: http://www.inniosoft.co.cc/devstation. As you can see, the quality is good and it caters for most things. Once bbPress starts getting better, upgrading will be easy. Also, if you have a WordPress Blog, you’ll be able to integrate the two. bbPress is aimed at simplicity and good operations.

Michael

[@r-a-y Participant 15 years ago]

There’s also PunBB and FluxBB (fork of PunBB) as alternatives.

Both are also lightweight and actively in development.

Although if you’re using WordPress for your main blog/CMS, you should think about sticking with bbPress for your forum.

[@raize Member 15 years ago]

Thanks for the replies. I have faith in BBPress…it’s a very stable and lightweight product so it has a strong base to build from. If it can achieve even a fraction of what wordpress has, I think many people will be happy. I hope to contribute to the best of my ability as well, and I think I will be sticking with BBPress.

Cheers

[@raize Member 15 years ago]

Good news. There was a meetup on IRC today, and here’s a transcript of what was discussed. The idea of bbpress turning into a plugin for WordPress was thrown around, which would be awesome.

https://bbpress.org/blog/2009/12/2009-12-09-meetup/

[@zengyike Member 15 years ago]

if you need theme just google the keyword. you will find more bbpress theme which not showed on official bbpress site