There hasn’t been a lot of news about bbPress lately but earlier this week on the project’s development blog, John James Jacoby provided a status update on the progress of 2.6 and what to expect for 2.7.
According to the post, the team has worked hard on 2.6 since 2.5’s release in 2013. Unfortunately, two highly anticipated features that were expected to be in 2.6 have been pushed back to 2.7. Jacoby explains why:
Stephen and I have been steadily improving and readying the next major version (2.6) ever since releasing 2.5.0, and while many huge features and neat little improvements have already landed in the development version, there are 2 features that will likely get bumped to 2.7 so we can call 2.6 done:
- bbPress as Post Comments
- Forums as Taxonomies
These two features are fully architected and planned, but do not have enough progress in code for them to hold up the release of 2.6.
Users can expect to see betas and release candidates of bbPress 2.6 in the coming weeks. Jacoby notes that development on 2.7 will exclusively focus on the two missing features.
As someone who is waiting on the bbPress as Post Comments feature before diving into bbPress, I’m disappointed. I’m grateful for the time and effort Jacoby, Stephen Edgar, and others put into the project but considering its release history, it may be another 1-2 years before 2.7 is a reality. I don’t know if I can wait that long.
I agree. The development is simply too slow. I had to abandon bbpress for something being advanced more aggressively. As of 2016, bbpress seems a bit too “retro” for true functionality.
I’ve switched my discussion forums/comments over to a discourse based site. With the wp-discourse plugin (available on github) I’m able to integrate WordPress commenting into the forum site with little effort.
Discourse is a highly evolved (and fast performing) open-sourced platform on a quick development cycle. Has all the features I needed with plenty of community driven add-ons available.
Chad