bbPress 2 Beta 1 has been released as a WordPress plugin. bbPress is essentially the forum brother of WordPress, but unlike BuddyPress and other siblings, installation and integration were not too ideal.
The new version of bbPress not only introduces itself as a simple-to-use WordPress plugin for the first time, but it also carries an incredible amount of improvements, according to the launch post:
- Seamless integration with your WordPress site and theme
- Integrated admin interface for forums, topics, and replies
- Split and merge topics within a single forum
- Shortcodes to help you customize where your forums appear
- Currently comes with a child theme of TwentyTen to get you started
- Keep track of changes with topic and reply revisions
- Dashboard widget shows you a shapshot of your forums at a glance
- Automatically creates a new “Moderator” role for your forums
- Mark topics as favorites and view them within your new user profile
- Receive emails when new replies are posted to topics you subscribe to
- Anonymous posting lets you open your community up to the world
- Includes widgets to show latest forum activity
- Comes with an importer to move your existing integrated forums over
There are also some snazzy new features just for developers listed at the above-linked post.
bbPress 2 is not necessarily ready for use on a live site yet, but bbPress theme and plugin developers are encouraged to start testing now. If you encounter any bugs, please report them to the bbPress Trac.
Have you tried bbPress 2 Beta 1 yet? What do you think of if compared to bbPress 1?
I ran a test in my test site – it seems so cool – I have been waiting to see bbPress in this shape for a long time and they seem to have done it. Thanks very much bbPress devs.
This is great news. Installing bbPress was a nightmare, looks like it’s gonna be awesome now.
To be honest bbPress is such an useless plugin. It is neither forum nor a plugin.
I’ve tried it few times thinking that I’ll achieve simple forum with this simple plugin on that simple CMS known as WordPress but in the end it always turned out to be a disaster.
Finally I resorted to a proper forum script such as vBulletin (most preferred) and phpBB.
I’m not sure why this plugin is still being continued.
Glad that you mentioned it, I might try it again one more time to see if it has improved.