Let´s talk about bbPress and bulletin boards. Do we really need another bulletin board software? And if yes, does bbPress move into the right direction?

In my career as a web designer i have set up countless bulletin boards for Counter Strike clans, temporary working coops, musical projects, World of Warcraft guilds, file sharing communities and personal playgrounds. I mostly used the Woltlab Burning Board Lite 1.0.2, which was very popular in German speaking Countries like Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and off course Germany, but is mostly unknown in the rest of the World. In my Book it was the best bulletin board software out there. There was also a huge 3rd party plugin developer scene i was involved with. Out of nothing, it all disappeared.

When version 2.0 came out, it was very disappointing. While having a web2.0 Look and Feel, it had a stripped down and very limited functionality. People, including me, just weren´t willing to upgrade because things that worked perfectly before in the free version were now only available in the premium version or through plugins. I still have a wbblite1.0.2 running for my WoW Guild and it works just fine (and i love the theme).

So, wbblite is officially dead to me and there are many alternatives out there. It´s almost impossible for a single person to check all of them.  Probably the world wouldn´t need another bulletin board software. BUT. In a time where WordPress is not only the standard software for blogging but also becomes more popular as a CMS, there´s clearly a need for a bulletin board software that is very easy to build in into WordPress. To answer the Question from the first paragraph: Yes, i think there is a need for another bulletin board software.

Let´s also answer the 2nd Question: No, i don´t think that bbPress moves into the right direction. I don´t even know why automattic started a whole new project for it. I believe there could be a theme that makes WordPress itself usable as a board or another Version of WordPress. The core functionality is there. bbPress feels like it´s the redhaired stepchild of automattic and i think it´s a desaster that WordPress2.7 isn´t compatible with the most recent version of bbPress. If you had bbPress already on your site and you upgraded, it broke your site. It pissed so many people of. If there were more people using bbPress, this could have been a  Marketing desaster for Automattic. I think Automattic should just offer a modified version of WordPress to achieve forum functionality or a theme that does the job. This would also decrease development time and solve compatibility-issues.

I know that i won´t have the time to do it, but if i was the one building that theme i would do it like this:

♣ Chronological order: last commented thread is on top, not the most current published
♣ build tinyMCE into the frontend, that people can post without going into the wp-admin (yeah, new post option blabla)
♣ give commentwriters tinyMCE too
♣ Categories are the forums
♣ Frontpage: Display all forums (categories) with the threadname(postname) where the latest reply(comment) was, the date when the thread was started, the author of the thread, the date when it was last commented and the name of the comment-author.
♣ Frontpage: On top of the Forums i´d have a list with the last 10 active threads
♣ make sticky posts sticky on Forums and subforums (category and subcategory pages) too (i´m actually not sure if this is already in the core)
♣ Advanced User Role Managment

While researching for this post randomly reading forum posts (actually it was a reply by the WPTavern barkeeper Jeff which i completly overlooked when he made it) i came across someone who already tried to do this. I saw this after i wrote the paragraphs above. The dead one released a theme based on his TDO Mini Forms Plugin that turns WordPress into a Forum. The Problem is that, like bbpress, it´s not compatible with WordPress 2.7. The Loop was hacked and it doesn´t look very twopoint-O-ish. More O-pointthreeish. That´s why i didn´t test it as extensive as i might should have when i make post about this topic. I also know that there are some Plugins out there that try give wordpress that functionality. I tried 3 of them some time ago and i found all of them too complicated to use for that small amout of features they give you. I also know about a premium solution for WPMU that i haven´t tried yet – but forum software should be free.

WordPress is powerful. WordPress is meant as a blogging software, but with a few tweaks and twists it could be anything. I want to encourage Automattic to built their solutions not only on the philosophy of WordPress, but they should build it on it´s back. What speaks against having 3 different versions/download options  for WordPress 2.8 instead of having 3 completly different softwares that have to be developed independently?

I´d enjoy having a WordPress-powered discussion… and not only in comments.