For most producers of “killer applications”, it is virtually impossible to grow beyond the phenomenon of their “killer app”. The same seems to be the case with WordPress. Ignored and neglected for quite some time now, bbPress — the forum CMS (software) by WordPress — is trying to find its way into the WordPress user community as a WordPress plugin. Additionally the motivation could be Matt’s desire to drive WordPress into a full-fledged Content Management System (envisioning it to become the new-age Drupal). Most of your would remember that in WordPress 2.9.x they introduced the long awaited custom content types (only ‘post’ and ‘page’ existed till then). bbPress was hacked out of minibb — a lightweight forum software — by Matt on a weekend in year 2004. While WordPress forums had been running minibb, they transitioned to bbPress. In a recent chat session in Dec 2009 they brainstormed the idea of turning bbPress into a WordPress plugin.
WordPress itself became the blog CMS of choice for the blogging masses because of the easy availability of beautiful WordPress themes. bbPress on the other hand has been struggling to make its presence felt from the ground up. This change will allow bbPress to stand on the solid foundation of WordPress documentation, functions, themes, wide developer community and the likes. On the other side, the expected competition to vBulletin or Invision Power Board is quite not coming. Phpbb has made a decent effort and is one popular alternative; but wouldn’t something as customizable as WordPress be nice? Well bbPress it should have been. As of now it has already made an entry into the wordpress plugins directory as bbPress. And at the moment all it does is get uploaded and installed as a plugin and nothing else. So much for bbPress. But we are still wondering if WordPress will ultimately evolve as WordPress MU and other offshoots like BuddyPress will also merge into a possible glob of bulky software and eventually still be competing with Drupal? What do you say?
