The WordPress family has been really starting to grow lately. I wanted to let you guys know about two big releases: WordPress Multi-user 1.0 and bbPress 0.72.
WordPress MU is an official branch of WordPress that is designed for managing and hosting thousands of blogs instead of just one. It’s the software that powers WordPress.com, for example. MU has been in heavy development for about a year now, and we’ve finally polished it up to a place where we feel like it’s ready for public consumption. Since setup is a bit more complex than the 5-minute install of regular WordPress, MU is best suited for a more server-savvy audience. You can download it on the WordPress MU site.
Second I wanted to introduce an old friend you are all probably familiar with from our support forums, bbPress. bbPress is forum software with the WordPress touch, and developed by the same folks. It has some pretty cool features, such as tagging, RSS feeds, Akismet spam protection, AJAX interaction, but the team focused the most on creating something fast and light. bbPress can power a forum with hundreds of thousands of posts with just a fraction of the load as WordPress. (If we could re-write WP from scratch, it would be a lot like bbPress.) What is probably most compelling for WordPress users, though, is that bbPress supports complete user and login integration with WP.
bbPress is not quite 1.0 yet, some of you may recognize the 0.72 version number from the early days of WordPress, but if you’re searching for a little something fresh in forum software, try downloading bbPress and giving it a go.