bbPress is a project to build a new forum/discussion board software system. It’s made by the same people who built WordPress (quick disclaimer: both Gizbuzz and my personal blog run on WordPress) and its aims are stated (from the offical site) as:

1. Open Source, always and forever
2. Less (code) is more
3. Simplicity is a feature
4. Speed and security are the foundation of any good user experience
5. Put the user first

Now while they haven’t made an official release yet, and the software still is very much in an alpha-quality state, I thought it would be worth taking bbPress for a spin and giving a quick Gizbuzz review.

Just for reference - this review is of the nightly build version for 09/10/2006. All the nightly builds are freely downloadable here.

Installation

The installation process is actually quite easy considering the early stage of development, and it follows a WordPress-style install script after you create the inital configuration file (which at the moment has to be done manually).

You are asked to set up the administrator account on your forums and set up the first discussion area, before the install creates all the database stuff for you and gives you your randomly-generated password.

It’s actually quite refreshing that there are really only three steps - setting the database information (manually), entering your details and having bbPress do the work. For alpha-grade software, I’m impressed with the setup mechanism.

First Run

At first run, you might think “wow, this is ugly”. And don’t say they didn’t warn you - they obviously haven’t had a chance to put any kind of styles on the main system.

There is already a lot of the basic functionality here, including adding new topics, user profiles, (administrators) adding new forums, editing and deleting etc.

What I think is pretty awesome about bbPress even at this stage is that they have done something that a lot of forum software hasn’t done (or hasn’t done in a big way yet), and that is integrating RSS feeds into forum systems.

There’s already RSS feeds for each forum, each topic (to track new replies), which is great news. The current leader in open source forum software, phpBB, doesn’t have RSS feed functionality anywhere in it’s current incarnation. While this is likely to appear by the release of phpBB 3, it’s something I’ve really found lacking in phpBB in this age of syndication.

The admin panel

The admin panel bears a very similar resemblance to that of WordPress. Only the green colour scheme and the change of options makes it look different.

I think this UI consistency is very important, as anyone who has written or maintained a WordPress blog will instantly understand the interface. While the options are a bit thin at the moment, as the project matures I’m sure we’ll see many more graphically configurable options.

Conclusion

So while unfortunately there’s not a huge amount to see at the moment, the bbPress development team have made considerable progress. Aside from the lack of styling (which could be easily remedied with a small amount of PHP and HTML/CSS design skills and some time), bbPress is very usable even at this very early stage of its life.

So how will it stack up against the current open source leader, phpBB? Well I’ve played around also with the phpBB 3 beta. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to give a good comparison at the moment. bbPress is in very early stages, while phpBB 3 is at beta stage, and the stuff that isn’t new is simply evolved from phpBB 2, where bbPress is starting from scratch.

But nevertheless, I think when we do see bbPress 1.0 it will certainly be a big contender for phpBB and while I don’t think it will convert sites over immediately, new communties forming and where WordPress integration is important, bbPress has every chance of becoming very popular software.