bbPress 2.6 Beta 3 Likely as Team Focuses on Solid Data Migration Path

For the past few months, users have been testing bbPress 2.6 Beta 2. bbPress 2.6 will be the first major version update since 2014 and will include the following features:

Per-forum moderators

Improved favorites and subscriptions management

Improved BuddyPress integration

Performance improvements

User experience improvements to meta-boxes and admin-area tools

Tighter integration with the WordPress Dashboard

Template tweaks and clean-up

In an interview published last week, John James Jacoby, bbPress lead developer, shared insight into bbPress 2.6’s development. According to Jacoby, there will likely be a third beta as the team continues to work on a solid data migration path from 2.5 to 2.6.

“In the process of working on 2.6, some interesting things sort of happened all at the same time,” he said. “It kind of goes back to the old bbPress problem where WordPress.org is running 2.5 and is also running a hybrid of 2.6 to take advantage of performance improvements.”

Throughout the process of migrating WordPress.org from bbPress 2.5 to 2.6, the development team was able to resolve a number of bottlenecks associated with turning bbPress into a plugin.

“With every beta comes more feedback and the closer we get to release, the more feedback that comes in,” he said. “As we upgrade WordPress.org and receive more feedback, we fix more things.”

“With a small team, there’s no dedicated resources on the project which is the same problem that existed in 2014 when I did my Indiegogo campaign. I’m really trying to spend a lot of time working on it but I’m also spending a lot of time on the security team, contributing to WordPress core, Multisite, and other projects. bbPress is my focus for as much as I can afford it to be.

“bbPress 2.6 will ship, I promise, and it will be a better bbPress than it has ever been.”

Jacoby confirmed that there will likely be a third beta released sometime in the near future. Those who have upgraded to bbPress 2.6 Beta 2 are reporting substantial performance improvements.

If you use bbPress 2.5 and want to upgrade to 2.6 Beta 2, Jacoby encourages users to create a full backup of the site’s database as the upgrade migrates data for subscriptions and favorites. These changes are not easily reverted should you choose to downgrade back to 2.5.

For your convenience, I’ve clipped the portion from the full interview that includes our conversation about bbPress and BuddyPress that you can listen too below.