Matt returns to bbPress

[Ryan]

Matt Mullenweg is back in the bbPress community after a long absence. Those of you who frequent the bbPress.org forums will have noticed a growing anger at the way the bbPress project is being handled, so hopefully this will help temper some of those feelings.

Blog post:
http://bbpress.org/blog/2010/07/wordpress-integration/

Forum response:
http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpr...gin#post-71419

[Mark McWilliams]

Not to forget...! http://mark.mcwilliams.me/2010/07/bb...n-development/

* Which, for anyone just scrolling through, development on the bbPress Plugin has started!

[andrea_r]

I just not get the vitriolic comments.

I mean, I *understand* the feelings behind it, and I see some similarities with the merge of wpmu into wp, but there are some posts from people going way out of line.

[Ryan]

Nothing justifies the behaviour of WTFMatt. However the merge of Mu with WordPress was far less serious than this change to bbPress so I'm not surprised there are lots of grumpy bbPress developers. This is basically throwing out the existing software and so all of the work that every bbPress theme and plugin developer has done will become redundant - except for those using the legacy version of the software. Plus it will be confusing as heck for anyone Googling for advice about bbPress as most of the existing information will be totally incorrect.

I'd love to know who WTFMatt is as I'm guessing it is someone already known in the community, but is hiding behind their online anonymity. Very annoying indeed.

[Otto]

It seems a bit early to be criticizing the idea, considering no code has yet been written for that idea.

In essence, I see this as simplifying bbPress *a lot*. I've looking through the bbPress code for a while (for changes I'm making to wp.org) and there's a ton of duplicated code across WP and bbP. bbPress could actually become a quite straightforward plugin for WordPress and probably have a whole lot less overhead in the process. The majority of the stuff bbPress does could be duplicated with custom post types with very little code. There's some neat possibilities for theme integration as well, which will be where the majority of the work would quite likely be.

I know we had this discussion here about making a forum using custom post types, but looking at this, I can really start to see the possibilities. BTW, I now think topics should be "posts" and entries in those topics should be "comments". But then again, I also now think "comments" should be a new post type.

And you're going to love this: "Forums" should be a custom taxonomy. :D

[chipbennett]

Hey! Here's something about which I agree with and support Matt 100%!

[chipbennett]

I'd love to know who WTFMatt is as I'm guessing it is someone already known in the community, but is hiding behind their online anonymity. Very annoying indeed.

Did his comments get deleted? I didn't see anything from anyone named "WTFMatt".

[Rich Pedley]

If they have been deleted it is about time, but he was/is not the only vocal one about things.

I've decided to step back from those forums until things settle down. I just don't like the atmosphere over there.

[Ipstenu]

The atmosphere was fairly vitriolic before the 'going to plugin' stuff started. Once the plugin was announced, it got way worse. In part, the forums were why I left (that and no one was using my forums, so it wasn't worth my time to keep it up). I don't regret the time I spent, though, as bbPress let me whet my teeth in a new way that made dev for WordPress much easier.

But egads. The people are why I have my 'Don't email me' comment in my profile.

[Rich Pedley]

Glad to know it isn't just me! We are old hats at it as well, what on earth do new people think of it all! I actually joined the bbPress forums back in June 2004... about the same time I started with WordPress !