More about BBpress

Own a blog and still thinking about a forum. BB press can really be a good solution for you.

If you own a blog powered by Wordpress 2.1.x, then bbpress is the best solution for you for integrating wordpress with BBpress. There are some ways you can even extend your forum to use the wordpress theme, which i am not much aware of . I tried it once and messed up with my wordpress theme also. So be careful unless you are sure of what you are doing.

Advantage of bbpress over other forum tools like phpbb, vbulletin etc etc :

1. Its different : Yeah its different from the fourms running all across the web. I am a memeber of lots of forum , and mostly all run on the same phpbb. And finally they will so different from your blog. Tags comes inbuilt and provide faster and easier option to the users.
2. Customization: Customization is the biggest advantage of bbpress forum. You can make it work your way . If you are good at css and php , you can really make it do wonders. Even if you are not a expert in this, no need to worry , you have themes to work according your way.
3. Open source : You get all the files along with bbpress, edit it and use it your way. It comes under customization only.
4. Extremely light weight and Efficient : BBpress is extremely light and efficient. Wordpress forum is running on BBpress and has around 100,000 users and nearly 500,000 posts. Still it works with speed.
5. Extremely extendible : BBpress is extremely extensible with plugins. If you are good at writing plugins, and have written more plugins for wordpress , You can easily modify them for BBpress and they will work for sure :D.
6. Integration options with Wordpress : BBpress can be very easily integrated with wordpress. Once integrated , you can share data between wordpress and bbpress. For ex: You can display lastest discussion topics from BBpress in your wordpress and vice versa …
7. Other Features : It has got spam protection , Rss feeds , and simple interface. BBpress caption says it all. Fast Easy and Elegant

Limitations of bbpress :

A coin always has two sides. There are few limitations also (for the time being) :

1. Its new : Yeah , BBpress is new. It was released somewhere around October’2006 and still under the developement phase.
   
2. No WYSIWYG built in editor : Yeah there is no built in What You See Is What You Get editor. At times you will need to write Html code to get your things working. You can use plugins called Quicktags or get a third partly editor but, once you post some tags not identified by BBpress , you will get the code displayed. You should have some kowlege of Html atleast .
3. Not much Html Code supported : Tags like img , object (for you tube) etc are not supported. You can get plugins and get these tags supported, but basic properties of these tags wont be supported. For ex: I installed image plugin to display images on BBPress, but it doesnt identify Height and width property of the image tag.
4. Dashboard not much customized : Admin Dashboard doest have basic options like Theme editor , Plugin editor etc.

These limitations will be getting fixed in near future. I will be posting FAQ’s in wordpress installations and plugins for wordpress in next post .

more on bbpress at www.bbpress.org