A little less than two years ago, Matt Mullenweg jump-started the development of bbPress. A light-weight forum system, to be used for the support forum requirements of the WordPress blogging community. Soon, it grew to an enthusiastic, creative and prolific development team project, resulting in the now official release to the public of bbPress.
People who’ve used WordPress for blogging, love among other things - the ability to enhance the software with plugins and themes, and ultimately customize and make everything suit their specific requirements, wants, or personal style.
bbPress follows closely in that tradition. It is easy (and getting easier fast) to install and operate, designed with both extensibility and security in mind. If you want to build an online discussion forum, community, or simply integrate a forum to your current website or WordPress blog - this is an ideal solution. And light-weight as it may be in that it doesn’t really require a ton of useless stuff to work, it is a very powerful solution with a very active development effort. Which means there will soon be enough themes and plugins for it to satisfy everyone. And you know how hard is for “everyone” to be satisfied in this world.
So, if you’re thinking of opening up your own forum and have some knowledge of what that entails, head over to the bbPress website here and take it out for a spin. If you like it half as much as I did - you’ll be impressed. Don’t forget it’s free and open-source software, and there are very few things at that price which are worth way more than that price exactly.
