Over the course of 2012, bbPress has seen two major version releases, a new core committer, and a redesigned site with an emphasis on showcasing and supporting bbPress.

In 2013, the team plans to focus on improved searching, more integration with BuddyPress, and various performance improvements.

Along with bbPress’s new plugin architecture comes the easy updates. To update your installation from bbPress 2.0 to bbPress 2.0.1, simply apply the update like any WordPress plugin.

Simply by activating bbPress 2.0, any standard WordPress theme is suddenly capable of having support forums, user profiles, topic tags, and custom topic views. Your users are able to mark topics as favorites to read them later, and can subscribe to be notified via email to topic replies, so they never miss out on the conversation.

If you’re currently using the old version of bbPress, this new version comes with a handy importer to get you started, and there are importers for other forum platforms planned for the future. If you run into any trouble, please feel free to contact the bbPress support forums.

The developers are confident that this is the last release candidate and that it is ready to run on a live site, so if you want to test this out, now’s the time. If you run into any bugs, please don’t hesitate to report them and communicate with other users on the support forums.

• Akismet integration
• Fixes replies within wp-admin
• Fixes reply notification links
• Fixes inconsistent breadcrumb behavior
• Fixes theme compatibility issues
• Fixes archive and page conflicts
• Improvements to unpretty permalink support
• Improvements to importer
• Improvements to multisite support
• Normalize theme, shortcodes, and template parts
• Add humans.txt
• Add empty index.php files to prevent snooping
• Add max length to topic titles (default 80 chars)
• Add shortcodes for login, register, and lost password forms
• Add proper redirect handling to topics and replies, allowing them to live almost anywhere
• Add permalink collision warnings if custom slugs conflict

Though the first release candidate should be the next step, bbPress 2 is still not necessarily ready for use on a live site yet, but bbPress theme and plugin developers are encouraged to start testing now. If you encounter any bugs, please report them to the bbPress Trac.

• GlotPress integration
• Fixes Forum archive bug on some installations
• Fixes and improvements to importer
• Adds home link support to breadcrumb
• Adds missing breadcrumbs to various template files
• Adds filters for future anti-spam support
• Improvements to templates and CSS
• Improvements to Theme Compatibility
• Improved RTL support
• Improved multisite support
• Topic/reply trash fixes

bbPress 2 is still not necessarily ready for use on a live site yet, but bbPress theme and plugin developers are encouraged to start testing now. If you encounter any bugs, please report them to the bbPress Trac.

The new version of bbPress not only introduces itself as a simple-to-use WordPress plugin for the first time, but it also carries an incredible amount of improvements, according to the launch post:

• Seamless integration with your WordPress site and theme
• Integrated admin interface for forums, topics, and replies
• Split and merge topics within a single forum
• Shortcodes to help you customize where your forums appear
• Currently comes with a child theme of TwentyTen to get you started
• Keep track of changes with topic and reply revisions
• Dashboard widget shows you a shapshot of your forums at a glance
• Automatically creates a new “Moderator” role for your forums
• Mark topics as favorites and view them within your new user profile
• Receive emails when new replies are posted to topics you subscribe to
• Anonymous posting lets you open your community up to the world
• Includes widgets to show latest forum activity
• Comes with an importer to move your existing integrated forums over

There are also some snazzy new features just for developers listed at the above-linked post.

bbPress 2 is not necessarily ready for use on a live site yet, but bbPress theme and plugin developers are encouraged to start testing now. If you encounter any bugs, please report them to the bbPress Trac.

Have you tried bbPress 2 Beta 1 yet? What do you think of if compared to bbPress 1?

There are a myriad of reasons why people create websites and put them online.  Some do it for fame and profit; others do it for passion and service.

No matter the reason you put your work and effort into an online endeavor there can come a time in the life of some websites that the comment system becomes inconvenient for discussions.

Now WordPress has done a lot to make it easier to follow along with discussions on a site based on that system.  The threaded comments option allows replies to be underneath the original comment that prompted the reply.  Even before it became an option in WordPress plugin developers were making it happen.

So when you want to take those discussions to their own piece of your website and create a forum what should you do?

Well there are quite a few options out there for forums and discussion boards.  Some have been made to integrate directly with WordPress at all levels and some of the stand alone boards can be integrated into your site as well using other options.

One of the more popular pieces of forum software for WordPress users is bbPress – which comes from the creators of WordPress.  bbPress is made to integrate with your WordPress database, share the same cookies and registration process.  Makes sense that the developers of WordPress would give you these types of options for their own forum software.

What about other forum software like phpPBB, Invision Power Board, vBulletin, and others listed here at WikiPedia. 

How do you go about integrating those forums with WordPress when they are not necessarily made to do it.  Integration is important at some level because you want to get people from your website to your forums and vice versa.

I have just started using phpBB3 on my site and am using the RSS Feed widget on my sidebar to show the latest threads on the board.

How are you doing it?

I am looking forward to hearing what methods and plugins you use to make this happen.  Is there other forum software out there besides bbPress that has been built to integrate well with WordPress?  In your experience do some of the forum programs have special features to make integration with WordPress easier?  With the experience of this community I know there are many things I am not thinking of that you all know about. 

Let us know in the comments. 

On December 9th, Matt published the chat log to the first bbPress meetup that occurred in the bbPress IRC channel. The attendees were made up of folks who volunteered to keep the project going. Here are some of the tidbits I learned while reading the archive.

There was a great debate amongst those in attendance on whether to continue bbPress as a standalone product, a dedicated plugin, or both. As far as I can tell, a concrete decision has not been made but quite a few leaned towards making an awesome bbPress plugin.

bbPress will become a registered trademark under the WordPress Foundation.

One of the biggest weaknesses of bbPress right now is documentation. Therefor, a documentation team has been put together comprised of Tom39Away, pmall, justintadlock, and Nightgunner5. For the first time, access to the bbPress.org website will be given to outsiders such as the documentation team.

Hajii who has been a long time moderator on the bbPress.org forums will be putting together a state of the forums where he will be stating where the forum needs help the most. If you’ve been looking at being more active on this particular forum, keep an eye out for the announcement for more moderators.

I was wondering when the name _ck_ would be mentioned which it was 37 minutes into the meeting. For those that don’t know, _ck_ was a very active bbPress contributor by being a forum moderator, producing a number of bbPress plugins and was recently brought on by Sam Bauers to help out with the project. But, after Sam left, _ck_ also left. There is some controversy as to why she left the project but Matt himself said he was surprised to find out she left the project.

I was very surprised when _ck_ left, I hadn’t heard anything from her like an email or anything — anyone know the story there?

Everyone took a stab at guessing why she left but the only one who really knows is _ck_. She had a loyal following and many in the bbPress community enjoyed her contributions.

The next big topic was plugins. There are many plugins for bbPress that only work up to 0.9. It looks like there will be a survey published on the bbPress.org blog in the coming days asking users what type of functionality they would like to see in the software which would not only generate core functionality ideas, but plugin ideas as well.

It’s also worth mentioning this information as well.

hajii: yes and to clarify just like wordpress.org, bbPress is not owned or operated by Automattic, it’s separate. Just because I saw a lot of people conflating them in the forums.

I own bbPress.org just like WordPress.org — separate from Automattic — and the plan is to run it in the same fashion. We’ll register the bbPress trademark under the pending foundation

Last but not least, the survey I mentioned previously has since gone online. The poll focuses on ideas and features that you think should be in 1.1.

So in the end, Matt is spearheading the project once again as he did when he created the software over a weekend back in 2004. In fact, this Christmas, bbPress will turn five years old. If you are interested in being a part of this renaissance, now would be a good time to head on over to the bbPress.org forums and make your presence known.

Strategically the most important thing we need to figure out is how to integrate bbPress better with WP more for people who want that — right now it’s easier to use one of the WP plugins for forums than bbPress.

I’ve only installed bbPress locally once to check it out but it’s not my cup of tea. I think the bbPress forum software is aimed at developers since it comes with all the basics to build on or around but doesn’t contain the feature set of modern forum software out of the box. For example, the SimplePress plugin for WordPress Matt mentions is packed with more features than the dedicated forum software. One idea I’ve heard Matt discuss with Sam that I think has a ton of potential is to replace or add onto the WordPress comment system with bbPress. This type of tight integration between the two is what I believe Matt wants to figure out. It would be awesome to have such an easy way to not only have a forum where visitors can start their own conversations, but also leave comments on articles on the blog side of things. I hesitate to mention Vbulletin but it’s the software that comes to mind that takes this to the next level by offering their own CMS with the forum software built into it.

One of the best things bbPress has going for it right now is the work of Andy Peatling. In BuddyPress 1.1 Andy rewrote the forums component from the ground up to provide one click internal bbPress forum integration enabling users to setup forums in a fraction of the time. BuddyPress is gaining traction and as Matt says, has all the ingredients to become as large and successful as WordPress. I think the more people that use BuddyPress, the more that will use bbPress building that community simultaneously with BuddyPress.

Your Thoughts:

You tell me, or Matt. What is the future of bbPress you would like to see turn into a reality? Also, if you use bbPress, tell me why and how.