BuddyPress

bbPress has always been the bastard stepchild of Automattic. After the failure of Talkpress (http://talkpress.com/) to generate income it is become even more apparent bbPress will never get any love. Automattic does little or nothing to support it or develop it. It’s only kept alive by a dwindling number of true believers. bbPress is a great concept, but it doesn’t go beyond that. I believe BP is the future of CMS. It has already surpassed the compatibilities of bbPress. This will become more and more apparent as things progress. I think BP needs to start work on their own forum platform and cut lose bbPress once and for all.

bbPress as a component of BP is weaksauce, I would agree. But it is a non-trivial project to write a fully-featured forums app/component. I would support native forums functionality in BP, definitely, especially if it let us do more with it, but I suspect given the lack of focus on that functionality here and in BP itself, that we’re not very likely to see it anytime soon, if at all.

I’d love to be proved wrong. BP with a robust forums component, native to the app, with an admin interface and plugin support — I shiver with pleasure at the very thought.

Don’ get me wrong, I understand why BP uses bbPress. It is currently the best solution. I just hope 2 years from now we are still not looking for workarounds.

I think that a savvy plugin-author would integrate BP with another opensource platform like phpBB. That way the energies of the phpBB team would be harnessed to BP use.

It’s kind of like horses and a wagon. phpBB is the horse and BP is the wagon. There’s no need to breed, grow, and train a horse from birth for your wagon. Just buy one that someone else has raised and hitch it to your wagon.

But all of that is much easier said than done. @dennis_h, are you a coder?

Isn’t BuddyPress just using bbPress as a core foundation for its group forums? So rather than supporting bbPress, isn’t BuddyPress using bbPress?

Also, I disagree that bbPress is just a concept, seeing that development has restarted again.
I have used bbPress in the past as a wordpress forum since its easy to change and easy to template when you know how to make templates for wordpress. Other than simplepress forums and phpBB which are a pain to change cause of the new learning curve and phpBB is almost not integratable with wordpress.

I’m working on a solution to intergrate bbPress with BuddyPress, dropping the group forums (I hate those).

@Xevo, I totally support your prerogative to “hate” group forums. I find it interesting though. IMO, putting forums into groups was BP’s stroke of genius. When you run a community (and I’d argue, a bbPress install does not a community make. It’s just a collection of discussions by users who can’t interact in many other ways beyond crude messaging), if you don’t group things by their contextual nature eg topic or theme, then you needlessly force the community to pour through everything to consume and engage what they want. I for one, can’t stand browsing through the old fashioned bb’s to find or keep up on information. So having a forum in each group allows me to to that and the extensible nature of groups turns them into much more than a discussion container.

Don’t get me wrong, the recent release of bp.org’s new theme/organization blew it in terms of usability, organization and understanding of how people create and consume information on a topic/s they care about.

Groups forums are KEY and they absolutely need to have a way of creating multiple topics in each forum as well rather than just a running list of recent discussions.

But what is also 100% key is to have non-group forums as well from same install. That way you can have a traditional forum in addition to group forums which totally makes sense because when you have 100′s of groups it’s impossible to keep track of where things are at like in a traditional forum, so you want to have a balance of both.

Also 100% key is the ability to favorite forum threads. A basic and totally necessary feature to make the current set up slightly more manageable.

has any of you tried to work more with simple press instead? i’m sure not everyone will agree, but there are quite a few appealing function of simple press as an ‘easy’ alternative to bbpress. because it is all in a page, there must be some clever way of writing plugin which allows to call a specific subforum link?

it has been a very long time since i’ve looked at phpbb, but integration with wp never seemed easy with that one!

I find it a bit annoying that the developers are so hesitant to speak on the matter, as it’s clearly a reappearing debate. Should that be interpreted as indecision, still?

Last I heard, bbPress was going to be rewritten into a native Wordpress plug-in, taking advantage of custom pages and all that jazz. mmMMMm, smooth. Probably a year away though?

In my comments on this subject I tend to be a tad too negative towards BuddyPress. In truth, it provides me with all the *essentials* right here and now, I just feel it could be quite a bit better, without all too much effort.

@sadr-

I’m not sure as to which developers you’re referring? There are only three core developers that work on BuddyPress and two of them are volunteers like the rest of us non-core developers. Andy, as the only core BP developer that is employed by Automattic, is charged with working on BuddyPress. He does not necessarily have any additional information–than can be googled–on what Automatic plans to do with bbPress.

@dennis_h, amen, preach it brother!

Yes, forums are very useful and popular, but they are just another way of displaying a conversation. The basic building blocks for blogs, forums or social networks are the same:

users
posts
comments

If you want a traditional forum view, you could probably create that in your theme.

There is no reason to bolt an external forum script on to Buddypress, with its own database tables etc. It only creates synchronization problems and confusion for the end user.

I have argued this before here and elsewhere.

Before I’m annotated as the Gospel of Everything Anti Forum let me say I love the current forums. I also believe Forums inside Groups is the best way to go (although more work needs to be done illustrating the logic to members).

I believe bbPress development is dead and BP should take the core and develop it to suite BP. Waiting for bbPress to implement features and hope they fit with BP is a incredibly bad way to develop a core need of BP. A break in the family tree is needed. BP has a far more engaged development community than bbPress. Allowing bbPress development dictate BP development is a recipe for…. well just read the bbPress forums.

I think Buddypress need some kinds of forums for detailed discussions. I don’t think it needs BBPress. The Activity Stream has nearly everything to replace BBPress. The only thing is missing is the ability to choose if you want to post an “Update” or an “Discussion” (or Forum Post, or whatever you want to name it). If you decide to post a discussion an input field will be added to title your certain discussion. By doing so all Discussions could be listed in a classic “Forum View”. Because it is all build with the Activity Stream technology users can reply from within the Activity Stream, have nested comments and all the great plugins that are developed to work with the Activity Streams.

I did a conceptual mockup 4 month ago and posted it on trac. I still think this is basically a great idea:
Trac Ticket: http://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1559
Mockup: http://trac.buddypress.org/attachment/ticket/1559/ForumActivityPublishing.gif

@21cdb (“The only thing is missing is the ability to choose if you want to post an “Update” or an “Discussion” (or Forum Post, or whatever you want to name it).”)

You could achieve that using categories and some if/else PHP. I did something like that in my P2 group blogs, that I use instead of forums. Wordpress 3.0 will apparently have custom post types that will make this easier.

I think Buddypress need some kinds of forums for detailed discussions. I don’t think it needs BBPress. The Activity Stream has nearly everything to replace BBPress. … Because it is all build with the Activity Stream technology users can reply from within the Activity Stream, have nested comments and all the great plugins that are developed to work with the Activity Streams.

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FWIW – I’m going to attempt this now… hopefully conning @r-a-y into helping (i need someone smarter ) I’m 99.1% sure it can be done