Official bbPress WordPress Plugin Surfaces, Speculation Abounds
By Dave Moyer, posted Jan 18 2010 at 6:00 am | 6 Comments »
Internet forums have been around since the early days of the internet. You might already be a member of WordCast’s very own! (If you’re not, you really should join.) A million solutions to manage them have also been around for just about as long, including such favorites as the open-source phpBB, the paid vBulletin, and many more.
Back in 2006, the creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, decided that all of this was nice, but a simpler, cleaner, and above all, faster system was needed for users who just wanted a bare-bones forum – nothing more. His product: bbPress, aimed to be just that.
Since then, bbPress has grown, though it has barely scratched the surface of the number of sites powered by the other “big boys” previously mentioned. What’s kept users away? Some say they’re just too set in their ways to switch, others think development needs to be more consistent and more frequent (though bbPress has definitely improved there as of late) and even more say that they’d rather have a more complex system with all the features they want out-of-the-box, rather than having to install all sorts of plugins to get something beyond a simple support or one-to-two topic forum.
bbPress is standing strong to its’ roots in simplicity, however, and that’s actually won quite a few webmasters over. It’s also become known as one of the easiest ways to integrate a forum with a WordPress site, as its’ close development with the WordPress.org project has made it easy to link the two together. It powers the official WordPress support forums, in addition to various other sites, though it has barely scratched the surface of the number of sites powered by the other “big boys” previously mentioned.
Image courtesy of Simple:Press Forum
Apparently hoping to take advantage of the WordPress connection even more, a bbPress plugin, authored by Matt and the rest of the bbPress crew, has appeared in the WordPress Plugin Repository. While users are warned:
Don’t download me yet. I’m in the beginning stages of development.
…it appears that the idea here is to turn bbPress into a Core Plugin, allowing users to simply install a plugin and get their forum up and running. Other plugins already exist that do this, including the Simple:Press forum by Andy Staines (right), which, in many ways, has more features out-of-the-box than non-plugin bbPress!
Will users switch, or will the fight between the two simply build up competitor plugins? Do you currently use bbPress for a forum project? If so, what are your thoughts on this plugin? Sound off in the comments or in the bbPress Plugin? thread of the WordCast forums.
Simple press forum integrates easier and better.
[...] WordCast reported on news of an Official bbPress WordPress Plugin (forum discussion), and the latest meetup January 13, 2010, generated a good list of major bugs that need attention, as well as the need for a bbPress Theme Directory and documentation, general documentation, and assignment of tasks. More news and meetup information is posted on the bbPress Blog and bbPress Support Forums. [...]
[...] end up replacing the stand alone version but that is still in development. You can read about it on WordCast. When the plugin comes out it will trump the need to do the following but for now, integrating an [...]
I’ve been trying out both for a new site vpsBible.com, which currently runs SP, but not for long (bbPress plugin or no plugin!)
SimplePress has way more features out of the box, and is easier to initially setup.
Then again, SimplePress is not so simple as bbPress when it comes to the daily use of the forum backend, and for most WP users simplicity really is the key .. so when Matt & Co’s plugin is out, making the db connection a snap, I reckon there will be an exodus to the new option which, as it already does, has the option of strapping extra plugin functionality to it.
All that said, SP is excellent. But .. and for me this is the kicker:-
It’s written in tables, bbPress is written in CSS and, as a webdev, CSS is so much easier to manipulate. Styling SP’s tables is painful and crude.
Tables are so pre-1999 and some search engines are actually penalizing table-designed sites as “not up-to-date” so it’s best to stay away from anything like that. Though, forums have long been designed with tables, forcing things into that grid format. I really like things done with CSS as it not just makes things easier to design, it loads faster and there is less code and chance for errors. Good point. Thanks.
I’ve been working with Sipmle:Press on several websites so far and I am far from satisfied. It is very difficult to style and one needs millions of CSS entries to let it look like the surrounding wordpress theme. And then there will still be flaws here and there in the design. On the other hand it is full of options and the support is also very good. The developers are constantly evolving SP so I hope it goes into the right direction.
bbPress on the other hand is quick and clean. But it doesn’t look like a forum to me at all. It is simply a bunch of topics in a folder with no typical overview. Nevertheless I see more potential here. I will have to work a little bit with bbPress to get myself more familiar with it.