Future Of bbPress Undecided

[Jeffro]

This is a tough question. What is the future of bbPress? Through the grapevine, I've discovered that Sam Bauers no longer works for Automattic but he is still involved with the bbPress project. How much he is involved I don't know. It's interesting to me because I've always attributed bbPress as Sam's project but in reality, Matt Mullenweg wrote bbPress in the time span of a weekend and then handed off the project to someone else to maintain.

So if Sam is not the lead project developer, who is? Some say Mike Adams might take a larger role. Others have told me that after WordPress 2.9 is released, there will be more effort to try and get more of the WordPress community involved with the bbPress project.

It's too late to cease development on the project. That's not an option, especially with regards to TalkPress. I wonder how accurate it would be to say that overall, it seems developers enjoy using bbPress more while end users don't. It's pretty obvous though that until the project gets at least half of the resources that are behind WordPress, it won't rise to the occassion and rival bulletin board software.

[BinaryMoon]

I thought they kept talking about all these new features for bbpress.

I'd be really disappointed to see it go - it's a really great little forum package. I wouldn't count it as a competitor for vbulletin, but with decent integration with bbpress and WP I think it has a lot of potential

[Ryan]

I wonder how accurate it would be to say that overall, it seems developers enjoy using bbPress more while end users don't.

Entirely inaccurate. How would an end-user even know the difference?

Unless of course you are referring to a bare bones bbPress install in which case end-users would hate it, but that's not really the point of it.

[Jeffro]

I understand where this person is coming from regarding there post.

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/some...s-is-just-less

However, I can imagine that if you're a developer behind the software and you are constantly being bombarded by requests and putdowns such as this, perhaps it takes its toll on the developer?

Here is a very interesting response from _ck_ who is very active in the bbPress development world.

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/some...ess#post-56000

[Jeffro]

Entirely inaccurate. How would an end-user even know the difference?

Unless of course you are referring to a bare bones bbPress install in which case end-users would hate it, but that's not really the point of it.

That's what I meant. Out of the box, it doesn't offer end users nearly anything that the competitors do but boy, developers sure do love that about bbPress.

However, the argument could be made that bbPress is not and may never be forum software that is meant to be a competitor to other solutions available. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is the general development attitude behind bbPress. So I guess I should stop comparing it to other established bulletin board software.

[Ryan]

I think I misunderstood what you meant by "end user". I thought you were referring to the users of the forum, in which case they'll never know what is going on behind the scenes and as long as the two forums have identical behaviour they will never know or care.

For new developers bbPress will definitely be harder to plonk up a forum mega quick. However for heavily customising it like people do with WordPress, the best forum software seems to be bbPress. The other forum softwares are a total nightmare in the way they handle their theming. phpBB seems a little better than most, but the other large scale forums are a diabolical mess of spaghetti code. It's just a pain that bbPress is lacking so much basic functionality right now so it would be very time consuming to make a bbPress powered site unless you were happy with something extremely basic or was hacked around a bit with some sloppily coded plugins.

[Ryan]

I understand where this person is coming from regarding there post.

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/some...s-is-just-less

Yeah, that seems to be a common feeling.

However, I can imagine that if you're a developer behind the software and you are constantly being bombarded by requests and putdowns such as this, perhaps it takes its toll on the developer?

I sincerely hope this isn't why he's left (if indeed he has - I haven't found anywhere but here that has reported this).

The last time I heard from him or saw him online was on the 26th of August. Before that he was online pretty much every day.

[Ryan]

Hmmm ... http://automattic.com/about/

Sam is no longer on the list of employees :(

It's entirely possible he's just decided to go work for someone else and Automattic simply hasn't managed to replace him yet. There doesn't seem to be anyone in the bbPress world that would be suitable for the job that I know of, so I'd guess that need to hire a random PHP developer to take it on.

[Jeffro]

There is a possibility that Michael Adams aka Blogwaffe might step up to take on a larger role involving bbPress but that is not confirmed.

[andrea_r]

I always saw bbpress as an add-on more than a stand-alone solution. maybe if the focus was turned around a bit to that?