BBPress Released

October 14th, 2006, by Rich.

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BBPress Released

BBPress has been released today (try it). For quite some time now I’ve been quietly using BBPress for managing thoughts and discussions on another website. This has been possible for two reasons: firstly, the pre-release version of BBPress has been quite stable and secondly, I’ve been using it in a password protected area so it’s not been open to public use and abuse.

BBPress is, quite simply, just another PHP based bulletin board (BB) system which to the layman means it is the software that runs forum websites. So in a market where BB software is two-a-penny (or cheaper, given the open source nature of most good software) what’s BBPress got that made me use it?

A Trusted Open Source
It’s core development is being handled by the same loose group of folks that build WordPress, which has powered this website for the last few years.
Minimalist Design
Every other BB that I looked at was full of bells, whitls, frills and flourishes that I didn’t need or want - and I certainly didn’t want the hassle of mainting or disabling such irrelevancies. BBPress eschews these in favour if a lean core, everything else (just like wordpress) can be done with plugins.
Extensible
Yep, I said plugins.
Integrable
I mentioned WordPress already, well, it can integrate nicely with it’s user database, so if you’ve got wordpress ID’s and roles that you already manage, they can be seamlessly used by bbpress, keeping admin to a minimum.
No Spam
BBPress can be protected by Akismet, the same service that already protects this site, which has now been blissfully spam free for over a year.
Released
I started using it before it’s release because I knew I had a fairly safe walled garden in which to get friendly with it. Now that version 0.72 “Bix” to give it it’s full name has been released, others with more public websites may want to have a play.

If you’re wondering what it feels and looks like, you can have a go on this site. Eventually I plan to move most discussion over to the BB side of things and leave comments open for trackbacks and pingbacks only.