eclipsenow

Wow, I’ve finally installed MAMP on my blog and got Fullscreen loaded in it.

Cool! Thanks for the heads up as to the theme name.

Does anyone know if there is any way to make pages come up on the cover like that rather than just posts? Is there a way to control what comes up on the home page? Cheers.

What SMF are you guys running? Was this plugin difficult to install? How are things running lately, and does this plugin still have sponsorship? (I get nervous with 3rd party plugins… look what happened to the equivalent plugin for bbpress, called bbsync. Now that was a sad story!)

I’m not having a go at the great work obviously done so far on this plugin, but am just stating that life changes.

Hi all,
sadly bbsync still doesn’t work AFAIK and so I’ll probably head with SMF.

At least SMF has this plugin.

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/post-to-smf-forum/

I wish bbpress were a truly “out of the box” solution with all the SMF features already built in.

I wish bbpress were a plugin to WP core, so that all I had to do was click a few buttons and it was there.

I wish this also had a bbsync blog-post-automatically-to-forum-post function that I could just switch on, also bbpress core.

But it isn’t. From the BBpress forums, it seems to have all sorts of issues integrating with WP.

I may as well just operate 2 separate databases, and keep the thing simple. Once users have logged in and accepted the cookies they don’t have to keep logging in anyway… they’re auto-logged in. If a WP post can be automatically shunted across to SMF as an SMF post with an automated link to that post, wow!

One day I hope to migrate my SMF database across to a truly “everything in it out of the box” bbpress forum, but right now the basic package is to sparse, and all the good “optional extras” that I call core basics could easily be dropped by 3rd party developers because they are not core. That is the key issue that makes phpbb3 and SMF a safer option for now. I can always convert later, if bbpress comes around. Just being honest.

OK, good points, and WP is a blog.

But if it heads into the CMS market competing with Drupal and Joomla, maybe it will want to back BBpress as an even easier, “WordPressier” kind of plug in that just shares everything really easily.

“They’re both php scripts and it doesn’t take a genius to skin them the way you want and make them share user login info.”
That’s where I disagree. I’m a humanities/arts kind of guy, and this stuff is a fairly mysterious arcane art to me. You guys do magic with code! ??

I’m sorry if the above came across as criticism, I’m really very grateful for all the open source communities are doing.

This isn’t about the way something displays on my blog, but how hundreds, maybe thousands of other people interact

I would be running a political activist forum which might attract politicians. It would be VERY bad to have say 2000 activists calling me in the middle of the night because SimplePress stopped, WP upgraded, it died… and I didn’t know how to fix it.

That’s why I was WISHING that there was an easy plug-in “official, full powered” forum for WordPress, backed by all the powers that back WordPress. WordPress is SO great and well respected but this quaint (and respectable amount of work!) little operation might be great now, but just as with bbsync, there are no guarantees. I want guarantees before committing a few hundred people to something.

I’m looking into it. SMF might have a script soon… if there’s just ONE solid converter out there, people feel they have a bridge to take then they can dance around between the other forums as they wish. One bridge, and I feel I could “give something a go”. Without it I’m reluctant to commit.

Yes, it looks really nice and is kind of what I’m after, but it is not backed by the “big names” of WP, like Matt or the Automatic team.

I can’t remember, is bbpress backed by Automatic?

I note that bbsync went dead, which would have helped tip the balance for me for bbpress… but alas bbsync is no longer supported.

What’s to guarantee that this won’t as well and that I’ll be stuck? I don’t know sql enough to convert databases from one type of forum to another.

When shopping around for a CMS/forum portal, it’s good to be cautious and flexible. If SimplePress had converters OUT into the “mainstream’ forums, I’d be happier, (because then you can generally find converters from one to another like SMF to phpbb3 to bbpress and back again).

But I haven’t been able to find any. It’s only got 2000 members of it’s forum, so that indicates that there might not be that many users of Simplepress. Even the Agora forum plugin for Joomla has 7300 forum members.

https://jvitals.com/index.php?option=com_agora&id=19&Itemid=105

Basically, I’d love Matt to take something like BBpress/Simplepress and make it a core feature of WP, just as Matt is making MUWP the standard soon.

But I still think WP comments should be as powerful as everything we normally associate with forums. That’s the way many other article-to-comment-on sites seem set up.

WYSIWYG
Images
Email replies
the lot

There’s some things I really love about WP, but I’m thinking of my non-technical academic political reform friends when I say WYSIWYG editing of comments as forum posts would REALLY help.

You’re right, sorry if I sounded a bit abrupt or harsh. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and yet only have a small amount of time each week to plod through my special “To Do” list called “CMS stuff to learn one day”.

The main reason I like WordPress is… it’s cool! The tutorials at WordPress.tv, cool. The themes? Cool. The control panel? Cool. Gravatars? Cool.

So thanks for your time, and I hope my responses above have not coloured anyone else’s views of a WordPress/bbpress combined portal.

I guess I’m just greedy, and want everything in one package! ??

ha? Won’t those last searches include stuff like all the bbpress forum posts on bbpress forums, from all the newbies asking a new forum whether it can do XYZ standard install on SMF or phpbb3?

EG: When I just google “Simple Machine Forum” I get
Results 1 – 10 of about 4,980,000 for “simple machine forum”. (0.41 seconds)

but here’s the thing, that doesn’t tell me whether 4 million of those pages just have text on them telling me that SMF bites!

So how is googling like that helpful? What does it tell me about the future of bbpress? How are important decisions like the future of WP as a community portal made in the Automatic community?

No one thinks BBpress should be in the WP core with bbsync as an option to just ‘tick the button’ to make WP posts come up automatically over in the forum? This could be a game-changing move for WP, and put it on a war-footing with Drupal and Joomla, both of which have powerful one-click forum install packages and have reputations for enabling “community portals”.

I’d love to see a fully-loaded BBpress CORE as this would then enable themers to then also theme up the forum to be compatible with the WP install, or at least take it to the next level with a ‘drop and drag’ editable WP/forum theme. Then activists worldwide would probably move in bulk to adopting the WP portal.

Until then, many are going with SMF portals, which can be ugly as but at least the forum software works and is ‘fully loaded’ out of the box.

OK, so there’s this plugin that pretty much does it.

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bbsync/

However, now I’m nervous to take it up because it is not core.

bbsync is another thing that has to be upgraded and compatible every time there’s another WP upgrade. That makes 3 things I’m waiting to be compatible… bbsync, wp, and bbpress…. why can’t these things be integrated so that an “upgrade” means one bit of software is fixed, and it is a one click thing and there’s no waiting for XY or Z to be ready? That would be too beautiful!

No one likes this idea?

OK, as you can tell I’m not very techie. However, what’s wrong with flash and databases? Won’t my images & stuff still end up displaying properly on my site?

I’m mainly looking at getting into something I can set up as a portfolio of my wife’s great design work.

Point & click is way the market is going, whether in flash or other stuff. A futurist mate of mine said that things are heading in this direction…

https://www.squarespace.com/tour/

It’s like iWeb (drop and drag, no coding unless you want to) meets WordPress.

It is one of those hosting & software package deals and at $8 the hosting/software package could save me hundreds of hours of trying to bend wordpress to my needs… and failing.

If WordPress.com wants to really appeal to the non-technical market, they’d better watch some of these “drop and drag” guys because the software is booming along in leaps and bounds in a totally code-free way and people are flocking to it!

I love wordpress… from what I’ve seen so far. The movie tutorials are cool, the overall themes are just so much more attractive than anything I saw in Joomla etc.

But I bite when it comes to coding! I’ve been, on and off, trying to learn CSS all year (while mainly running a print design business).

I can feel the pull of square space above…. the wife and I are going to use their 14 day trial, and if we like it we’ll be moving across soon, despite having 8 months left on our previous webhost contract.

I’ll let you know sometime next week whether we made the move across.

OK, don’t worry, found it… I RSS’d my “Favourites” and got it running in Google Reader… and this post here will probably come up in both my RSS to the individual thread and favourites RSS as well.

So, when I hit POST we’ll see if it works. If you don’t hear back from me, it has!

Cheers.

I’ve made this a favourite but there’s nothing new in my RSS Google reader.

If I RSS a thread, will it take it out of favourites?