The trip to Google was one of the most memorable and happiest moments of my life. I got to meet all the intelligent high-school coders from around the world, meet all the amazing Googlers and learn from them, receive a beautiful (but heavy ) trophy, have a lunch at Charlie’s Cafe at Google HQ, hack around the Google buildings, clicking pictures in photography-prohibited areas (well, kidding ), getting the Google Goodies (which included bottles, chocolates, pens, notebooks, books, stickers, big android plushie aka bugdroid, souvenirs, shirts, jackets and a blanket), buying Google Schwag (mouse, torch, key chain, USB port hub and other geeky stuff), having wonderful dinners at restaurants, touring the California Academy of Sciences and riding those cool Segways. It all amounted to be a whole ton of fun and enjoyment, but wouldn’t of course not have been possible without the efforts and hard work of Carol, Stephanie and the whole Google team, to which I salute!

A picture says a thousand words and, I have ~150 pictures uploaded on Picasa. That amounts to 150,000 words! OMG! Here is a slideshow of all of the pics that I took.

Devils’ Workshop has also published an article on me. It’s a blog for which I used to do guest blogging, and I’m really happy of my name being there in one of the India’s topped ranked blogs.

Hindustan (Hindi) paper also published an article in their newspaper, here is the clipping.

Hindustan - 19 March 2011 - Our Gautam is no less than a computer (Hindi)

Features

So what all are the things which have been already coded into the new plugin? Here’s an overview!

#0 Overview

As every forum, there are three basic things – forum, topic and reply. A forum is a collection of topics and a topic is a collection of replies. bbPress uses WordPress custom post types features for all the three things. Additionally, there are tags. As you might be knowing, tags are used for tagging topics to a particular word and all those tagged topics can be accessed by going to the link for the word. bbPress uses custom taxonomies for this.

Developer Note: At some places (in the code), the word ‘post’ is used. It is used for referring to topic and reply both.

#1 TwentyTen Child Theme

TwentyTen Child Theme

bbPress bundles a neat and clean child theme of the TwentyTen theme. It implements all the current available features in bbPress. You may find some chunks of more details here.

#2 Administration

The Settings Page

Much like the bbPress standalone, you get to manage forums, topics, replies, topic tags, settings and do things like recounts to get your forum counts back in sync.

#3 Forum Type, Status*, Visibility*

Forum Type, Status and Visibility

Forum type means.. um.. forum type – ok, whether the forum is a normal forum or a category. Topics can be made in forums, but not in categories. Status means whether the forum is closed or open and visibility defines whether the forum is visible to all or is it private.

#4 Topic Actions

Edit, Trash, Close, Stick Topics, Merge and Spam Topics

In bbPress, you can edit the topic, close the topic, stick it, mark it as spam, merge it with another or trash or restore or permanently delete it.

#5 Reply Actions

Edit, Trash, Spam Replies & Split Topics

Like the standalone, you can edit replies, mark them as spam, trash or restore or permanently delete them and split the topics.

- # Splitting and Merging*

Split Topics

Merge Topics

As shown in the above two captures, you can split and merge topics too! These are an essential part of the forums as generally people start up unrelated discussion on a topic, making it necessary to actually delete the replies. Instead, you can just split the topic. If you find two similar topics, just merge them.

- # Trashing, Restoring and Deleting*

The plugin makes use of the internal WordPress functions to help you trash topics and replies instead of permanently deleting theme. Once you’ve trashed them, the plugin would show you the options for restoring or deleting them.

- # Stickies

Sticky Topic

Stickies are announcements. You can stick topics to their respective forums or the front page of the forums.

#6 Revision Log*

Enter Modification Reason Form on Topic Edit Page

The Revision Log below the Topic

The bbPress plugin brings a very innovative feature with it. That is a revision aka modification aka change aka edit log. This makes use of the WordPress revisions feature and stores a revision when a topic or a reply is edited. We may probably add revert to a revision feature in the future too (though you can already do that from the admin section!).

#6 Loginless Posting

Loginless Posting Form

You might not have seen the loginless feature on bbPress standalone, it is one of the features which would be introduced in bbPress 1.1. The bbPress plugin, too allows you to make topics and replies without logging in. This can be disabled by a single click from the settings page.

#7 Favorites et Subscriptions

Favorites and Subscriptions

The bbPress plugin allows you to mark topics as favorites or subscribe to them. Both the features work in a very similar way, except for the fact that your favorites generate a feed for you and are shown to all the users while only you and administrators can see your subscriptions and you get mailed when a new reply is made to the topic you subscribed to.

#9 Views

View - No Replies

You may define views as “predefined search queries”. When you create a view (or a plugin creates it for you), a link is generated to that so that the user can go to that and view the associated topics. Examples of views are no replies (see the capture and notice the number of replies on the topic), un-tagged etc.

#10 Statistics

Statistics & Popular Topics

Everyone likes showing off statistics (well, if they’re a good number). bbPress creates a statistics page for you and displays information such as the number of forums, topics, replies, registered users, topic tags etc. Additional information is shown to moderators and administrators (like hidden i.e. private, spammed and trashed topics).

#11 Dashboard Widget

Dashboard Widget

The dashboard widget gives you a quick look of all the statistics (#11), and the plugin version you’re using. We’d be probably adding some more like recent topics, replies etc.

#12 Profile + Edit

Profile Page

Excerpt of the Profile Edit Page

The profile page shows the topics you’ve subscribed to, the topics which you’ve marked as favorite and the topics you’ve started. You can also edit your profile from the front-end.

#13 Widgets

Forum Widgets

The bbPress plugin makes use of the WordPress Widgets API and adds various widgets like forums, topics and replies with various available options.

#14 Tag Management

Tag Management

On the tag page, you would find a tag management form with which you can rename it, merge it or destroy/delete it.

@todo

There are some things which still need to be done. You can view a list of all the open tickets here.

Call for Testers

As the plugin has already got so many features, it might have also got a lot of bugs, and would need a great amount of testing. Thus, I request you all to checkout a copy of the plugin branch and test it on your (local) (test) WordPress install! The plugin is still in bleeding edge state, which means if you upload this plugin up on your site, it might be broken or it might break your site or the upgrades might not be as smooth as expected (that’s why it’s bleeding). A beta or alpha might be available in the next month or so, though.

* Means that these were not there in the bbPress standalone, and are new features introduced in the plugin.

Ps. I wanted to write this post on the new year, but couldn’t as I was busy with Google Code-in. Anyhow, instead of posting it on 1.11.11, I’m posting it on 11.1.11.

Pps. I have a habit of forgetting things, so if you think I’ve left out any feature, do remind me of it in the comments!

Ppps. Phew! That was long! Thanks for reading.

Requirements:

• bbPress 1.0+ (works best with bbPress 1.1+ – it hasn’t been released yet)

Screenshot:

bb Mystique (click to enlarge)

Download: http://goo.gl/cN8V

Another thing is that now I would be rarely updating/adding plugins for standalone version (v1.1 or below) as it would be waste of time, instead I would spend my time on improving the bbPress plugin (v1.2 and above).

There are also some heated discussions going on in the bbPress forums about having another name for the plugin or having its version number as 2.0.

Also read: WordPress integration (official blog post)

Changelog

• Fixed a bug in which the API key sent to the server should be different for each user – Check here
• The proxy script now makes use of WP_Http which is much more reliable
• Added an option for Accepting All Suggestions

Developers can see the changes made to the plugin files here.

Download: http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/after-the-deadline/

Image Credits: Me, I know it is a bad fork

Someone asked Matt about bbPress. Matt confessed that he dove into bbPress. He admitted that he became a little burnt out on it. bbPress will undoubtedly be tied closer to WordPress. The future of bbPress will be a really awesome plugin. He even admitted that right now, it would be better off to use another plugin rather than bbPress. Matt said he just needs a little more time before he dives into bbPress again. The bbPress community was a bit rough around the edges and the flame war that ensued forced Matt to break away for a bit.

(Source – WPTavern)

The above is an extract from a post on WPTavern, on which _ck_ commented about the issues, BackPress bloat etc., to which Matt replied back in his comment, also mentioning that bbPress.org 2.0 was underway.

The new theme is designed by Sam Bauers (see this topic), it was designed a while back but has been put up now only.

Here are some screenshots comparing the before and after design:

bbPress Forums (Old Look)

bbPress Forums (New Look)

bbPress Forum Topic (New Look)

Personally, I am very happy to see this development taking place and the bbPress community gaining back its momentum along with a major contributor of bbPress – _ck_. I hope this continues and never ends.

What is Scr.im?

Scrim is a service made by Ozh. To scrim is to protect your email address before sharing it so that only real people will use it. You can read more about scrim on its about page.

Screenshots

Scrim Email Saver Plugin in Action!

A Preview of the scr.im Page

Download: http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/scrim-email-saver/

Changelog

• The following options have been added for the user (can also be mass-disabled from the admin page):
  • AutoProofread if the user has forgotten to run the spellcheck
  • Ignore always option
  • Ignore types
• Updated AtD/jQuery – Changelog
• Added an AJAX loader image
• Added screenshot of the profile edit page and updated admin page screenshot
• Updated hindi translation

Screenshots

The Settings Page (with the new settings)

The settings on the user's profile edit page

Update (26-03-2010): After the Deadline v1.6.1 has been released which has the latest version of AtD/jQuery and also fixes some upgrade notification issues.

Download: http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/after-the-deadline/

Changelog

• Compatibility with bbPress 1.0
• Usage of reliable WP_Http instead of cURL or fopen
• Automatically gets the new repository list if available, when you go to the plugin browser page
• The directory folder of a plugin now need not have pb– in its name, nor a pb–revision.php, which means that now the plugins are checked with their version numbers.
• Added i18n support
• Coding cleanups (including WordPress style coding), optimizations and improvements

Todo

• Add a daily auto-check for plugins and notify the administrator if any plugin has a new version

Notes

• If you were using an older version of plugin browser for bbPress than v0.2, then it is recommended that you remove pb-- from the plugins’ directory name in the my-plugins folder.
• If the plugin list is not updating for some reason, then go to the plugin browser page, and in the URL add this – &force_update=1 and press enter. The plugin should then make a new list of the available plugins.

Download: http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/plugin-browser-for-bbpress/