Recently, has been fending off questions about , the popular open source, free forum platform. This past weekend at , and last month at , audience members begged for an update on the status of bbPress. He joked in Denver that he felt he was being stalked by bbPress fans.
In a way, he is – from several directions.
was developed by Matt in the early days of WordPress, at a time when forums held their own and blogs were still new online publishing platforms. The assumption was that bbPress and would easily integrate since they were designed by the same person(s). Unfortunately, they didn’t play well together at first.
For those using WordPress and bbPress forums, the hassle of merging the two is frustrating and tedious. They want bbPress to recognize that WordPress is installed and automatically configure the two to work together seamlessly.
Those dependent upon bbPress for their forums long for a few feature improvements, more bbPress Plugins, and improvements in bbPress documentation.
With recent announcements from the bbPress blog and forums, it looks like all parties will begin to see some light at the end of the tunnel.
Within the last few months, a lot of activity is going on around the popular forum program. Matt admitted that he’s ignored bbPress development over the past few years, but this year, with renewed energy from developers like , bbPress is revitalized with and improvements for integrating . While there are instructions on in the bbPress documentation, Bauer recently produced a video how to on for . He also worked with long time WordPress developer to produce the which integrates bbPress into a WordPress blog for logins and user access, all controlled through the WordPress Administration Panels.
The close ties between the WordPress official sites and the bbPress forums for WordPress and WordPress.com users, and the demand by WordPress users for such integration, has brought about the development of a wide range of WordPress Plugins to make the process easier and improve functionality.
Some popular bbPress Plugins include the integrates bbPress forum live posts within WordPress blog, the which automatically adds WordPress users a bbPress role of member when registering with the WordPress blog, and the adds administration features from bbPress admin to WordPress Administration Panels.
Last year, to help him bring some “sexy” to bbPress with a variety of bbPress Themes, opening up the design potential for bbPress users, just as WordPress Themes has done for WordPress blogs. Forums don’t have to be boring looking, so why not. However, currently, outside of the bbPress forums and searches, there isn’t a single repository for bbPress Themes nor announcements except for fan sites.
With this new invested interest in bbPress, expect to hear a lot more about various bbPress Plugins and Themes. I’ve highlighted some more interesting bbPress Plugins and bbPress forum usages below.
keeps a list of and have put together a based upon number of posts, users, and user votes as their favorites. It is an interesting collection and mishmash of different forum types and topics.
The top 5 bbPress Forums are:
When it comes to handling volumes of content, the Top 100 bbPress Forums list showcases with 949,229 posts and with 844,685. That’s a huge amount of data.
If you sort the list by number of users, though I’m not sure where the statistics come from, the top six bbPress forums are:
It’s fairly likely that the number of users on the WordPress Support Forum and WordPressMU Forums are tied together, as are the India and Spanish WordPress.com forums, which accounts for the matching numbers, and with the age of the WordPress.org forum, you would expect to find a lot more users. Either way, the number of users for these is incredible, showing what bbPress is truly capable of.
Out of curiosity, I checked other WordPress related forums and their numbers were also impressive. They include:
The variety of topics covered by all the different forums on the list is impressive. One that especially caught my eye as a fan is the .
There are a lot of people using bbPress to run forums on their blogs, though not many sites offering tips, tricks, and techniques for using bbPress. This hasn’t prevented bbPress fans from creating some fascinating forums and bbPress Plugins to help them manage and customize their forums.
is one such fan forum for bbPress users and features an extensive used on the site such as the modular which allows a variety of modules for customizing informational content like , , and .
Other bbPress Plugins they list and use on their bbPress forum include:
Looking at the wide range of bbPress Plugins, I was surprised at all the possibilities, and at a loss as there isn’t much on the wiki to help bbPress Plugin developers, though it continues to be listed on main resource pages.
The is active and does list a variety of Plugins. Some interesting bbPress Plugins I found there included:
is almost non-existent. Most of the information on installing, using, and customizing bbPress can be found in fan blog posts and on the .
is packed with questions and answers and tips for using bbPress with WordPress and without. A few good tips and techniques listed on their forums include:
They also offer the to help bbPress webmasters, administrators, and Plugin authors.
Some more articles on bbPress and WordPress integration, usage, and tips include:
It’s clear that has come a long way from its early rough days, and hopefully, it will continue to grow and evolve to become easier to use, especially alongside a WordPress blog.
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