Working with bbPress - Pleasant and Frustrating!
First of all I guess I should start with the mandatory paragraph about how I’m still alive and all is fine, I’ve just had personal things that I’ll tell you about and so forth. Only this time I won’t. It’s personal and I don’t feel like sharing. But I celebrated my birthday last night though, so now I’m officially one year older, which makes me 22.
One of the things I’ve been working with which isn’t all that personal is the website for our football (soccer) team. Our season just ended, and we managed to get ourselves promoted one division! Of course this means that we need to take it one step further online as well, because we take pride in having one of the best websites of all the clubs in our area. As the WordPress lover I am, it is of course WP-powered, and you can see it over at Skognes.com if you wish. It’s in Norwegian however, so most of you probably won’t be able to understand it.
One of the steps we’ve decided to take in order to expand and improve our site, particularly because we want it to be a tool for internal communication among us within the team, is to implement a messageboard. I’ve been intrigued by bbPress, a forum package by Matt Mullenweg and the other guys that blessed us with with WordPress, but I’ve never had a chance to try it, and such it was only natural for me to try it out this time around.
It’s the idea of simplicity that compelled me the most about bbPress, as for something like this going with for instance vBulletin or phpBB seems like a complete overkill. The idea of being able to expand and include features that you want by choosing from a vast selection of third-party plugins (just like WordPress) also seems to make more sense than including a bunch of bloated features that you don’t really need from the start. Of course it’s also a big plus for us with several authors already registered in WordPress that integration is a piece of cake.
Right from the go, everything works a little well. The default design is kinda bland and crap, but that didn’t really matter for me as I wanted to more or less integrate it to our WP design anyways. I’ll come back to how that went in a moment. The first problem I encountered was with the permissions. My default account, even though set to “Key Master” (the highest admin level in bbPress), couldn’t do anything that required admin permission. What I could do however, was create a dummy account, make it Key Master and use that to perform all the adminstrational duties. From the looks of the bbPress support forums, I’m not the only one struggling with this bug.
The second problem that arose was the fact that none of the two existing plugins that let me restrict forums to certain members functioned in the way I wanted it. One of them could have done the job just fine though, had it not been for the fact that it wasn’t compatible at all with the latest version of bbPress, and couldn’t be used. Thus I ended up with having to make all of the members that needed access to the restricted forums moderators. Hardly ideal, but that’s the best solution for now though. Better permission controls is definitely on my wishlist, and in my opinion quite necessary.
I mentioned that I needed to tweak the design a bit also. I decided to start with the Superbold theme which looks like this:
Screenshot missing
Even with my relatively limited grasp of HTML and CSS, it didn’t take me more than around two hours to modify it to match our WordPress theme, and the end-result as of now is this:
Screenshot missing
More or less a carbon-copy of our WP design, and I’m thrilled with how easily you can change the look and feel of bbPress, which is arguably its strongest feature. Of course, I’m nowhere near finished with the design, and in the near future I hope to make the individual sections of the content look cleaner and more organized. The 9rules notes section and the Kindea Forums are good examples of just how clean and nice it can look.
All in all, I can recommend bbPress to those who have quite a bit of knowledge of coding. I love the idea of it, but it’s disappointing to see how small the community around it still is, even though it’s been around for a while. The bugs are frustrating, and don’t seem to get any attention in the support forums, and such it’s hard to work with for those of us with no knowledge of coding. Hopefully, Automattic will be giving it more attention in the future, which in turn will result in a bigger and more active supporting community for bbPress, because the vision behind the software certainly requires people willing to develop plugins and extentions for it if it is to be a feasible solution for most of us.