Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

Announcing bbPress

Design, WordPress, ,

The software that was running the WordPress support forums was getting long in the tooth and was not handling the load of increased exposure terribly well. A PHP upgrade rendered it nearly unusable. Anyway, long story short, I wrote some forum software. It’s called bbPress and is similar to WordPress in a lot of ways, including being Free-as-in-Software. The things that WP does well—unicode, timezones, XHTML, speed–it does well too. You can read all about it on the new bbPress site and grok its philosophy, comment on the blog, join the mailing list, checkout the code, submit bugs, patches, et cetera. I have been putting this off for almost a year now, so it’s very fufilling to get this project rolling. It went so fast that I’m kicking myself that I didn’t do it sooner.

The goal of bbPress is to bring some weblog and WordPress sensibilities to forum software. It’s never going to have a tenth of the features of phpBB or vBulletin, but that’s a feature itself. My experience with those packages is they’re like a herd of elephants who evolved on a strange island in bizzare ways, and they tend to foster a type of community that is antithetical to I’m trying to accomplish. We’ve learned a lot in the past few years about how the interactive web works, why do most forums look and act the same they did in 2000? Why is it still so hard to integrate user systems or mesh designs? Why can’t I ping a thread like I can a weblog post? Why can’t I filter by XFN values?

bbPress is not and will not be right for everyone. There are open source traditional forum packages, like PunBB, that get a lot of things right and push the envelope in interesting ways, so that’s covered. bbPress is not going to have avatars, or put post counts next to your name, or give every user 80 options about how they want their dates formatted, and for some people (maybe most people) that just won’t work. However even if WordPress.org is the only site that ever runs this software, it’ll be totally worth it just to get the forum technology growing again and create a richer support experience for the WP community.

Comment Spam is a thing of the past

Akismet, WordPress

Comment Spam is a thing of the past. That method I’ve found to be 100% effective in stopping bot-based spam, but you still need some sort of content moderation for manually-entered spam. A version of Stopgap Extreme called WP Hashcash is in the new plugin repository and undergoing shared development. The repository has over 55 plugins already and it hasn’t even been officially announced. 🙂 (And this doesn’t count.)

Attention.xml

WordPress

I finally got a chance to read through Attention.XML that Tantek has been bugging me to look at for a while. It’s a lot like OPML except more verbose and I don’t have any toolkits that work with it easily. On the other hand it has some excellent ideas with regards to extensibility and I could see supporting this for something like updating WordPress’ link times, if it could be done elegantly. Groups are a little confusing, but I just read on the Technorati list they’re cleaning that up. I’m going to their holiday party later with Cheyanne so I hope to learn more.

Ideas

WordPress

Things I need to blog before I forget: (1) Cocoa gui for SSH tunnelling — profiles, status menu (2) Mac OS X port of myTunes redux (3) Replication plugin for WordPress — plugin file captures _POST/_COOKIE headers and replicates to an array of other installations, allows WP to be massively redudant and scalable with only commodity shared hosting.