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Published Tuesday April 1, 2008 at 1:06 pm
By Thord Daniel Hedengren
What bbPress Needs To Really Work
I’m a dedicated WordPress user, and I know the system if not inside out so good enough to do more or less anything I want with it. That means I’m pretty psyched about the bbPress forum software, AJ’s written about it previously, the popular guide post. That was a while ago, October 2006 actually, but I’d say it still works out if you want to give bbPress a go. It might be a bit easier and polished today, but not much.
bbPress is still a bit from 1.0. Quite a bit, honestly. While I do think a forum system should be pretty slimmed down, not including everything I don’t need (but offering it as great kickass plugins), there are some things that bbPress lacks that just have to be in there.
- Subscribe to updates. There is a RSS option, but I want an e-mail digest as well, telling me when someone posted in the thread I’m interested in.
- Individual forum access. Sometimes you want locked forums, so why not let me set access on a per user basis? Or, failing that, for groups of users at least? And please let me have users in several groups, thank you very much. (Need private forums today? There’s a plugin, at least, although it is a bit lacking.)
- User bling-bling. At least some bling… You know, avatars, signatures, those kind of things. Actually, those two would get bbPress a long way. Not being able to set up a signature even, that’s pretty weak if you ask me.
bbPress is still a bit from 1.0. Quite a bit, honestly.
One could also argue that bbPress needs more themes and plugins, since although there is quite a bunch of the latter, they aren’t really as refined as you’d think they would be, it being a sister project to WordPress and all. Also, the presentation is miles behind, especially now when WordPress is in 2.5 and sports a brand new look.
bbPress is in version 0.8.3.1 at the moment. While they say it’s not quite ready yet - obviously - I’d say it is pretty stable. I’m using it for some closed groups at least, but that’s about it.
Well, there are plans now, so I need to decide if bbPress is ready. In my opinion, it works, but it doesn’t work as well as it should.
What do you think? Is bbPress ready for a live site?
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At first I thought this would be great. But then again, I am an active member of several forums, so I think I know how the forum software should run….bbPress is way too simple.
I’m not saying vBulletin, Invision Power Board and phpBB are any better, they all have nice features, but they are a pain to develop for.
I will probably be looking at it later in the week in more detail, see how accessible it is.
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I use it, and I was less-than-impressed the first time around. I spent way to long getting WP and bbP to talk to one another. One thing bbPress would have quite the angle on is integration between the two, but right now it’s as difficult to integrate an external one.
I’m impressed right now with Vanilla, and of course punBB is good–stripped down but good.
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I love the simplicity of bbPress and I hope they save the bling for either plugins or optional activation. It’s just right for smaller communities.
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I’ve used it on live sites - for a simple forum, it does what it says on the box (as they say). Sure, it could use a ton of improvements, and I agree it’s miles behind WP.
But for a really simple forum that integrates well with WP, it totally works.
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It’s good for very, very basic purposes. Indeed, it was originally designed as a support forum and this shows throughout; all the features that communities actually like to have are absent.
I’m a huge WordPress fan and advocate the development of a forum brother, but at the moment other free forum software such as MyBB, punBB (totalspore.com has an excellent WordPress/punBB integration), and some others are simply too refined, too mature, and too good for bbPress to compete with.
And of course for more complex forum layouts and architecture such as my own LucasForums (click into sub-forums to drive the point even further), the feature set offered by bbPress isn’t even close to being adequate.
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I’m running a bbPress Forum on a live site and it works fine. The same bbPress user can write some comments on the wordpress blog with the same account. That’s wath i need. Shure, the backend could be the same pretty like wordpress 2.5… I hope the development isn’t stopped!
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All good points here. Besides 9rules Notes and the official WordPress/bbPress sites, are there any great examples of original use of bbPress? Anyone got any nifty links on that?
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It’s not like bbPress is the only application that can do that though, Renato; punBB which I mentioned above can also integrate with WordPress user accounts. And as you can see from the example I gave above (Total Spore forums), punBB integrates really nicely with WordPress.
bbPress isn’t bad, but when you look at other free software out there in a bit more detail you’ll find that they’re superior. bbPress isn’t the only forum software that’s gone for the ‘clean and lightweight’ philosophy, and in bbPress’s case it’s simply too lightweight. It doesn’t have basic innovations in forum software that’ve evolved over the years. It’s like going back to 1999.
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Like with most software packages, it is hard to please all. It really depends on the initial design decisions of the developer/community, as forum software can be created to be ’simple’ while others want to bling them out.
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Oh, and 0.9.0.1 is out. Nab it if you haven’t.
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It’s not like bbPress is the only application that can do that though, Renato; punBB which I mentioned above can also integrate with WordPress user accounts. And as you can see from the example I gave above (Total Spore forums), punBB integrates really nicely with WordPress.
bbPress isn’t bad, but when you look at other free software out there in a bit more detail you’ll find that they’re superior. bbPress isn’t the only forum software that’s gone for the ‘clean and lightweight’ philosophy, and in bbPress’s case it’s simply too lightweight. It doesn’t have basic innovations in forum software that’ve evolved over the years. It’s like going back to 1999.