BBpress/WP Forum was always the poor cousin of the WordPress stable, left malnourished until it became pale skinned and suffering from rickets and almost died. Beautiful whilst young but neglected in youth as Matt was seduced by the temptations of Silicon Valley and IPOs.
You are correct. WP Forum is weak and not up for the experience that users expect these days but all you will hear here are condemnations from the high priests of Mattodoxy, and lectures extolling the virtues of WP purity.
There once was a very neat and useful bridge between WP and phpBB called WP-United buts creator went MIA having discovered girls in Tokyo sometime around 2010, the site become a bizarre spam magnet and has since choked to death and died. It should have been properly supported. It was great.
Buddypress, on the other hand, is the autistic handicapped cousin of the WordPress stable that nobody quite knows quite what to do with, that consumes vast amounts of people’s time and effort but will never it seem mature to experience a full and proper adult life. Euthanasia would be the kindest thing to do but the powers that be seem unable to do so as it was once someone’s baby. May be they will have to wait until the father of it dies before they can do so.
There is another way to achieve what you want and what make for the basis of a solid social networking/discussion website, that is to; a blog front end conceptually framing and introducing a discussion back end.
And that is, just use phpBB but create a phpBB skin to look just like a blog. Then enable that skin *just* for one forum and use that forum as your frontispiece “blog”.
I’ve seen this done with a perfect Twentyten type clone and it works excellently. I wish the phpBB crowd would consider such a feature but they are stuck with the same ‘head stuck up the ass’ … ‘not invented here’ … mentality of the Mattodoxy.
It’s strange how these social media people cannot talk to each other and communicate … but, you see, it is all about ‘BROADCASTING’ not listening and never, never, never, interoperability. God forbid we share the market place, we want to conquer with our products.
So there you go … a dry, ironic assessment of the situation and a proposed solution.
You see … most of the folk you will collide with here tend to the geekier end, have flirtations going on with Unix Shells and reminisce of the old days of close academic networks and text only IRCs when *real* communication took place between people who knew and followed netiquette rules.
They don’t like thick, ordinary common people with their infantile demands for quotes, options, embedding video and, god forbid, icons, smilies ‘liking’ each others and doing stuff like that. They can go and do Face-Mart and it falls over and crashes like Mysplurge.
Think of WP kind of like the chilled Applestore of social media … except an Applestore run by Big Bang fans who insist on inflicting the clowns’ noses of default Gravatars upon you.
And what they say if you question it all too much is, “if you want it, you go code it then” (equals … It’s our ball and we taking it away from you).
It’s a community for which you labor for free in, but their ain’t no democracy about the direction it’s going on.
Try the solution I mentioned. It’s on Google somewhere.
