(btw nice site design… even the form buttons have been taken care of)

I assumed it would be a lot more sensible to create a plugin which integrated an existing bbPress install into your WordPress installation.

Ryan, what sort of integration are you looking for? WordPress and bbPress are already fairly integrated, pretty much out of the box.

So no, bbPress will never be a plugin for WordPress.
(but there will be a plugin for WordPress to automatically INSTALL bbPress, which I think is a different animal entirely than what you are asking)

I assumed it would be a lot more sensible to create a plugin which integrated an existing bbPress install into your WordPress installation. I guess if you can install bbPress with the wp-content/plugins/ folder then that would make a lot of sense though (I’m assuming that’s what you have in mind).

I’m guessing getting it to work within an existing WP theme will be quite complex though. Sounds exciting :)

bbPress was written out of parts of WordPress code by Matt (in just a few days) to replace minibb on WordPress.org. It was released a couple years later as 0.7 under GPL so it could benefit from the free labor of community contributions, just like WordPress.

bbPress 0.8 and 0.9 actually corrected several of the “mistakes” in WordPress that have become a burden of legacy and backwards compatibility. But with 0.7-0.8 integration was not a main focus and no attempt was made to make it particularly easy, though it was possible. By 0.9, integration had become quite a bit easier (that is until WP 2.6 then 2.7 then 2.8 kept changing the @$%!@$ cookies and breaking compatibility).

Matt then decided to have TalkPress created, which is like a forums version of WordPress VIP – Automattic hosted forums for premium customers. However he wanted an easier to maintain code base between the projects and object based caching like WordPress, so he directed that a subset of WordPress code be created (backPress) and replace the existing code in bbPress.

So bbPress 1.0 as it stands now is a rather different creature internally than 0.9 – it maintains most of the 0.9 compatibility thanks to a massive effort by Sam (but still breaks enough to be a pain in the @#$ to plugin developers). However because of the backPress bloat from WordPress, it’s now 50% bigger than the relatively lightweight 0.9 and takes 50% longer to generate most pages due to it’s increased complexity to interface with backPress.

Until WordPress itself is changed to also use backPress therefore sharing code during integration, and to the best of my knowledge there is no such intent stated on even the far future timeline, deep integration of bbPress into WordPress requires a massive amount of code to be loaded and executed for every page (nearly 1 MB per instance) and at least 30 queries per page BEFORE plugins do their thing. Such a load would get a user kicked off most shared hosts without caching on a busy site and forums don’t lend themselves to page caching as well as a blog because members typically get non-cached pages.

So no, bbPress will never be a plugin for WordPress.
(but there will be a plugin for WordPress to automatically INSTALL bbPress, which I think is a different animal entirely than what you are asking)

ps. all of this is simply my opinion based on observation and experience

We’ve had some ideas around this, like making a WordPress plugin that installs bbPress for you. That way, the installer can automatically gather all the integration details it needs without user input.

So yes and no is a possible answer, but strictly speaking, there are no plans to make bbPress a plugin for WordPress. We would loose a lot of the softwares speed and malleability if we did that.

Adding bbPress support as a plugin would still be handy for some people though and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t happen eventually.

One must remember though, bbPress was designed for the WP support forums. It’s not designed to be everything to everyone, and it’s not designed to be a simple, plug-in solution.

@JD Hartley – I’m in the same boat.

@Brad – While integrating the two through the database is pretty easy, I think bbPress in a plugin would make the entire process even easier.

@Ryan McCue – I understands that. But look at the merger going on with WordPress MU and WordPress. I think it’s conceivable that somewhere down the road, bbPress can just turn into a plugin for WordPress.

@Chip Bennett – I also see no harm in keeping them separate but if through a plugin, you could replace the commenting system in WordPress with bbPress, wouldn’t that be pretty cool for integration?

@Nicolas – BuddyPress is a series of plugins that when combined together, form BuddyPress. It’s not stand alone software.

@Dan Cole – That is where I was coming from with this poll. I think the possibilities are there for some sort of way for WordPress to take bbPress to the next level. Or the other way around.