I was surprised, upon installing the forum at how many people were signing up, and I wanted to be able to monitor it’s popularity, so naturally I set about porting my existing plugin with a view to keeping it usable on both WordPress and BBPress platforms.

In total it required about three small code changes, and the upshot is that the same code can now be installed on BBPress and WordPress.

The main difference is that if you’re using it on BBPress there is no nice user interface in which to set the uastring, you must do this by hand.

Instructions

1. Download this file
2. Edit line 27, changing $uastring = “UA-00000-0″; to whatever your ua string is.
3. Create a folder called “my-plugins” within your bbpress directory.
4. Save the file as “googleanalytics.php” to your my-plugins folder.

…and that’s all there is to it. Of course, it takes Google a few hours to actually show any results, so I have no idea if it’s working perfectly yet, but if you reload any forum page and scroll to the bottom of the source you can see the analytics code in place, doin’ it’s thing.

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?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Extensible
   Yep, I said plugins.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.