Learn Spanish Online One On One

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.

As the WordPress forums grew with bbPress under the hood, bbPress was tested to it’s full capacity, leading to a variety of customizations and tweaking to accommodate the growth and evolution of WordPress into a world-wide acclaimed blogging platform. With that growth out pacing bbPress development of the platform for the public, frustration within the WordPress Community also grew. This was highlighted recently by long time WordPress Support Forums volunteer, , developers, and staff that the support forums need improvement to keep up with the demand upon the forums and the volunteers and staff who run them, requesting they improve the functionality of bbPress.

There is a lot to be said for a program technically not out of beta development that is capable of handling the sheer massive volume of traffic and forum posts every day for two of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, WordPress and WordPress.com, but more needs to be done to help it meet that demand.

From the user perspective, bbPress has been too silent too long in development. More and more bloggers want to add a forum to their blogs, and naturally turn to the sister product of WordPress, bbPress.

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:

• (Netherlands)
• (France)

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 .

bbPress Plugins

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:

• allows administrators to include any markup in their forum posts.
• will allow image tags in forum posts for pngs, gifs, or jpgs.
• allows easy uploading of Avatars to user Profiles.
• displays images on current page with lightbox effect.
• allows users to rate forum posts.
• adds clickable smilies or emoticons to forum post textarea.
• adds an easy button toolbar to the forum post textarea for allowing quicktags in BBcode such as links, lists, bold, italic, etc. BBcode must be enabled, such as the .
• is a faster version of the BBcode feature that allows users to mix bbcode and HTML in the same post.
• generates lastest discussion list from bbPress Forum into your WordPress blog.
• hides forums within bbPress.
• allows viewing of previous posts on the topic when editing the post.
• creates private forums within bbPress.
• adds private messages within bbPress forums.
• This plugin displays all users which were online over the past 5 minutes. It can also display when a user was last online on his profile page.
• helps add a policy Page to your bbPress forum.
• creates threaded posts so users can reply to individual forum posts in a thread fashion.

Tips and Techniques for Using bbPress

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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