What the hell is BackPress?

[Ryan]

Chip's proposal topic got me thinking back to a great article by Andrew Rickmann I read recently (check out the comments too):

http://www.arickmann.co.uk/web-publishing-bare-minimum/

Is BackPress basically a version of WordPress which has had all of the extraneous crap extracted from it? ie: it has no admin panel, no existing taxonomies etc?

That seems like it could be quite useful.

But would it not be more sensible to have BackPress and then a bunch of plugins for it which added in all of the various chunks of WordPress until the actual WordPress was formed? The chunks might not be called "plugins" since there would be no admin panel to activate them, but they could be loaded in a similarly modular fashion.

Or is that already how it works?



I'm just wondering if that is feasable, if it's already been done, or if that's maybe the direction BackPress is heading in.

The ability to extract massive chunks of WordPress out sounds pretty handy. Sometimes I'd like to use WordPress to do some pretty basic stuff just because I find the API so darn handy. But writing a plugin for WordPress just so that I can do something basic, like store something in a database, seems totally overkill (ie: not even bothering to use it to load a web-page).

[chipbennett]

I was of the understanding that BackPress was intended to provide an underlying communication system to provide for tighter integration between *Press projects, such as WordPress and bbPress.

[Ryan]

Yes, but I think it achieves that by extracting the core out of WordPress and using that to power the other systems.

So AFAIK, it's basically just the guts of WordPress without the fluff ... I think.

Then you can take that and build other stuff like bbPress with it and since they operate in much the same way under the hood, it should make getting them to work together fairly easy. It also allows the same code to be used for both projects which saves development time and should (in theory) reduce bugs.

I think it's basically a PHP framework of sorts, but aimed at creating CMS's in particular. I could be WAY wide of the mark though. I'm just taking pot-shot guesses here.

[chipbennett]

Yes, but I think it achieves that by extracting the core out of WordPress and using that to power the other systems.

So AFAIK, it's basically just the guts of WordPress without the fluff ... I think.

Then you can take that and build other stuff like bbPress with it and since they operate in much the same way under the hood, it should make getting them to work together fairly easy. It also allows the same code to be used for both projects which saves development time and should (in theory) reduce bugs.

I think it's basically a PHP framework of sorts, but aimed at creating CMS's in particular. I could be WAY wide of the mark though. I'm just taking pot-shot guesses here.

Probably right.

I also seem to remember that, with the stagnation of bbPress (and now its pending conversion to WordPress plugin status), BackPress was basically left to die...

[Ryan]

I also seem to remember that, with the stagnation of bbPress (and now its pending conversion to WordPress plugin status), BackPress was basically left to die...

No. Andrew Ozz and I assume a few others are working on it.

It makes up the backbone of WordPress so isn't disappearing any time soon. It was discussed on the WP Hackers mailing list not that long ago. They didn't explain much about it though.

It's available via SVN so I might go grab a copy and take a look:
http://backpress.automattic.com/
http://backpress.org/

[Ryan]

Hmm, I downloaded it. A lot of the files look familiar. But it is definitely a LOT more cut-down than what I had in mind.

I was hoping there would be an index.php file and some sort of XX-config.php file for me to setup a DB connection, but there isn't. There's just two folders with a bunch of files. I was hoping for it to behave something like loading the wp-load.php file in WordPress, where it automagically gives you access to pretty much everything inside of WordPress.

It's a bit like looking into your wp-includes folder. Lots of random files which do recognisable stuff. But clearly to make use of it you would need to build a lot of stuff around it to make it do anything useful.

[Ryan]

Some old but interesting information I found on the project:
http://lists.automattic.com/pipermai...ay/020251.html

[andreasnrb]

Hehe its funny that there are discussions to make WordPress more like Habari.

[Ryan]

I quite like the idea actually. I guess it's not likely to happen any time soon though unless BackPress or something similar could be developed into something like that.

I wouldn't have thought it was even that difficult. Just add all the chunks in via hooks like everything else in WordPress. Or maybe I'm over-estimating the complexity involved.

There could be a separate repository where you downloaded each chunk, plus the "core". But on WordPress.org/download/ you would get the standard WordPress that most people would want. But for those of us who wanted a lean, mean, content management machine we could just utilize the bits and pieces that we need.

[Otto]

BackPress is a long term goal of having the shared components of the various *Press projects in one place and sharing one code base.

It is not at the point where I'd say you can build something new from it. It's in the process of being created as the *Press projects continue to develop.