A bbPress alternative for WordPress

[greenshady]

First time post and I hope I'm not adding something inappropriate here, but as a user/developer I would genuinely like to know how a new forum plugin would differentiate from the other alternatives, like simplepress and the forums package the great pods guys have put together. What would the advantages be?

I'm sure this will be question many users will have and they likely won't be that interested in knowing about the underlying structure (custom post types etc), but what the difference would be from a user experience level.

At the moment, I'm mostly thinking about the underlying structure. I'll get to work on user experience later. Both Grant and Ryan answered the question well, but I'll give my thoughts too.

Not to sound too selfish, but I'm creating this plugin for my own use. And, I hate things that are hard to use, complicated, and/or bloated. Like most things I create for myself, I figure other folks would like to use as well. If I have a need for it, surely others do.

I also don't worry too much if 10 people or 1,000s of people are using my work (though 1,000s is way cooler). I'm not out there to compete with others. I'm just doing my own thing because I haven't found a good alternative. If others find value in my work, then that makes it all the much better.

Pods

I can see how this would be useful for some things, but I'd rather use the WordPress API calls and template tags. I want something that simply plugins into WordPress and uses the features it gives you. From an average user experience perspective, Pods probably isn't the way to go. It seems more like a developer framework.

SimplePress

Not to knock the creator(s) of this plugin, but it's likely gained the popularity it has based on the fact that there aren't really any alternatives. I'd honestly rather spend a few months building my own plugin than use this though, which is what I suppose I'm doing. But, it would definitely be competition if people want a lot of flashy features.

What my forum plugin is about:

• Lightweight as possible.
• Only provide the basic functionality needed for a forum.
• Use WordPress functions as much as possible.
• Allow it to be themeable with pretty much any WP theme.
• Work alongside other plugins.

I don't want something that has every feature imaginable. For example, private messaging is a standard feature in most forum software. But, I consider that plugin territory. This doesn't have to be a feature of a forum plugin. It can be used without a forum. (By the way, I do have a few ideas for a PM plugin.)

I want to lay down the infrastructure and have a basic, usable forum that integrates into WordPress as if it had never not been a part of it. Everything else can be added as an additional plugin.

[Ryan]

(By the way, I do have a few ideas for a PM plugin.)

There's a BuddyPress plugin which I assumed could be used for that.


I had to grit my teeth reading through posts on bbPress.org a while back with people suggesting that the new plugin should have a PM system built into it. I couldn't think of a polite way to tell people they'd totally missed the point of bbPress (potentially) becoming a plugin and that PM's had nothing to do with the forum plugin at all - so I never actually replied to them.

[grant.swaim]

Justin,

I am not a coder, but I can definitely help with testing and UI feedback for this plug-in. A forum is the last major feature I need to add to my site, so I am excited about this project.

I would like to have a public forum and also forums that are only available in a membership area. I control access to membership areas (pages, posts and categories) on my WordPress powered site using aMember.

Would I be able to control the access to a given forum by being able to control access to a page, post, or category?

Thanks!

[PeterK]

Grant, Ryan and Justin, thank you for explaining the advantages. I now got a better feel where the new forum plugin would fit in and it makes a great deal of sense. In most scenarios

The only other question that comes to mind is whether using custom post types for the forum is a disadvantage over having a separate database dedicated to forum posts. Or is that a non-issue from a mysql/database performance side of things? Actually I suppose it is no different then having a lot of ordinary posts, except that the potential for accruing a bigger database is there if a forum gets a lot of usage.

Thanks again for the helpful replies. The forum looks very clean, looking forward to trying it out!

[Ryan]

The only other question that comes to mind is whether using custom post types for the forum is a disadvantage over having a separate database dedicated to forum posts. Or is that a non-issue from a mysql/database performance side of things?

The performance difference should be negligible I think. If you were to compare the performance of say bbPress to using WordPress with custom post-types the difference would be quite large. I had a conversation with Sam Bauers (former bbPress lead developer) last year about this and he suggested that bbPress would use ~40% of the system resources that WordPress would. But even if you used a custom database structure to handle the posts/topics with a WordPress plugin, you still need to load WordPress itself which is where most of that extra performance bloat comes from, not from using the WordPress API to store and access the individual posts/pages.

[greenshady]

I am not a coder, but I can definitely help with testing and UI feedback for this plug-in. A forum is the last major feature I need to add to my site, so I am excited about this project.

I'm going to need some real hardcore testing of it on a live installation soon. I mean I want people to try and break it by posting too much, editing their topics, or whatever it takes. It'll need to be used. So, when that time rolls around (likely within a week), I'll be sure to you all know.

I would like to have a public forum and also forums that are only available in a membership area. I control access to membership areas (pages, posts and categories) on my WordPress powered site using aMember.

Would I be able to control the access to a given forum by being able to control access to a page, post, or category?

If your membership solution supports custom post types, you could control access to a forum, a topic, or even an individual post/reply.

Honestly, that's the real beauty of using a post type for each element. One of the biggest hurdles I had with my original plan was figuring out how to handle forum metadata. As a taxonomy, this wasn't possible with the current version of WP (though I hope they do add a term meta table at some point).

Assuming the plugin works with custom post types, you could use nearly any post-related plugin with this.

By the way, the next version of my Members plugin will have custom post type support.

The only other question that comes to mind is whether using custom post types for the forum is a disadvantage over having a separate database dedicated to forum posts. Or is that a non-issue from a mysql/database performance side of things? Actually I suppose it is no different then having a lot of ordinary posts, except that the potential for accruing a bigger database is there if a forum gets a lot of usage.

Otto has a good reply to this question. I can't remember if it was in another thread here or a blog's comments section. If I can find it, I'll point you in that direction.

[kriskarkoski]

I'm looking forward to helping test this when ready. I've been running bbPress for a couple years on my main site, mainly because it was the only option that played well with Wordpress at the time, but I've been looking at my options for changing it for awhile now and this seems like one of the best.

While this won't be needed for preliminary testing, I think it'd be worthwhile to develop a way to import/export from bbPress.

Thanks for your work.

[Ryan]

I think an importer from phpBB would be more useful than one from bbPress. Most forum softwares use phpBB as the conversion tool since it has converters for pretty much every forum software imagineable. There are also very few people using bbPress at the moment but a massive number of phpBB users who would likely be happy to move to a good WordPress plugin if one became available.

Having said that, Justin uses bbPress himself so presumably a bbPress importer is on the cards at some point.

[Ryan]

I had a conversation with Sam Bauers (former bbPress lead developer) last year about this and he suggested that bbPress would use ~40% of the system resources that WordPress would.

I got that wrong. He actually said WordPress uses ~30% more system resources than bbPress.

[scribu]

Justin, have you considered joining forces with JJJ and PeteMall in recreating bbPress as a plugin? http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2010/07...ams-for-3-org/