Finally after few years in beta, alpha, gamma and release candidate, bbPress finally launched their first final version to the public. bbPress is the only forum plugin that works natively for WordPress blogging platform.
Some of the improvements over the earlier releases:
- “Voices” count on topics reports the number of individuals participating in a conversation
- Native support for cookie integration (single sign-on) with WordPress 2.7 and 2.8
- Optional support for memcached object caching
- Time-zone and Daylight Savings time support
- A complete XML-RPC publishing API
- Pingback support – each topic can receive pingbacks, just like a blog post
- All javascript has been moved to jQuery
- Optionally allow login via email address as well as username
- New meta API allows arbitrary meta data to be stored for posts, topics, forums, options, tags or even meta (that’s right, meta-meta – first legitimate use wins a prize)!
- Display names used primarily for user identification display, which allows special characters to be used
- Themes can now have a “functions.php” file, which is automatically loaded
- Accessibility improvements on forms and in the default theme, including WAI-ARIA roles
- Major overhaul of the admin interface
- Optional Akismet statistics page
- Cute new icons from Ben Dunkle (pictured above)
- Improved use of posts admin to manage spam
- Prettier Kakumei (default) theme
- Hello Louie! Plugin