Community Interview with John James Jacoby on BuddyPress, bbPress, and social

By 82 days agoMarch 2, 2012

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Believe it or not, I have never — ever — properly interview John James Jacoby, also know as JJJ or J-trip. John is the lead developer on the BuddyPress and bbPress projects, and has been working for Automattic since November 2010. In this interview we talk about the futures of both BuddyPress and bbPress, or “the bbs”, his slew of old jobs, and something called a Faquith.

You’ve been warned.

See the various listening options below, or have a listen straight away (The interview is approximately one hour long.):

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BuddyPress and bbPress Codexes see big updates

By 99 days agoFebruary 14, 2012

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Last weekend, when everyone else was taking a break, John James Jacoby took the time out to refresh the BuddyPress Codex along with creating the new bbPress Codex too. Both are running on WordPress.

In the announcement made on the BuddyPress.org blog Jacoby said:

You may not know it but we’ve had a codex here at BuddyPress.org since the early days. It’s mostly made life really difficult and forced everyone into the forums or to other sites for help. Today, I’m really happy to report that the core team has spent some time this weekend to finally refresh the BuddyPress Codex.

No official announcement was posted on the bbPress blog, but it was mentioned on Twitter.

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Attention forum lovers: bbPress 2.0 final is now available

By 246 days agoSeptember 21, 2011

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Early this morning John James Jacoby announced the availability of the final version of the bbPress plugin, lovingly known as bbPress 2.0. The plugin is available on the WordPress.org Plugin Directory, and is the collective work of over thirty code contributors. Just don’t forget to give the plugin a fair rating after you try it out.

Just in case you’ve been under a rock, or perhaps forgotten just what makes bbPress cool, listen to Jacoby break it down:

Simply by activating bbPress 2.0, any standard WordPress theme is suddenly capable of having support forums, user profiles, topic tags, and custom topic views. Your users are able to mark topics as favorites to read them later, and can subscribe to be notified via email to topic replies, so they never miss out on the conversation.

The final release includes Akismet and BuddyPress support built-in, and will support either one right out of the box.

Be sure to visit the bbPress 2.0 launch post to see the full list of props for the final release, which I’m proud to say includes a handful of WPCandy contributors. If you’d like to reminisce a bit, check out the bbPress tag we maintain to see how far the project has come in the last year.

Now that bbPress is out you really have no excuse not to give it a run. Once you’ve given it a try, stop by in the comments below and share your experience.

bbPress plugin 2.0 RC 5 is available, because you know you wanted another one

By 252 days agoSeptember 14, 2011

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bbPress lead developer John James Jacoby has announced the release of the fifth release candidate of bbPress 2.0, the long-time-coming reimagining of bbPress as a WordPress plugin. Release candidates are typically released just before the final public version of a plugin is available, and bbPress has been in this stage for the last few months.

With the latest update, Jacoby explained, theme and BuddyPress compatibility fixes were introduced as well as improvements to email subscription and the API for developers. Jacoby also said “We’re pretty confident this is the final release-candidate before launch,” which should be exciting to those who have been waiting for the final public release.

For those waiting on bbPress but not using it yet — why not? We’re using it on the WPCandy Forum, and really couldn’t be happier with it.

bbPress RC 4 is ready to be pressed by your hands

By 267 days agoAugust 30, 2011

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John James Jacoby has been a busy guy today. After the BuddyPress beta announcement earlier he published the announcement that bbPress RC 4 is now available. Why RC 4 already? According to Jacoby the last few release candidates have been put out without mention due to a high amount of feedback on the plugin.

bbPress now has tighter integration with Multisite, BuddyPress and Akismet. There’s also an updated green admin color scheme added as an option alongside the standard gray and blue admin color schemes.

You can grab the bbPress plugin from the WordPress.org directory. Are you using bbPress yet? How do you like the newly added green color scheme?

bbPress Release Candidate delayed for more beta feedback

By 308 days agoJuly 20, 2011

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The bbPress plugin is currently in a public beta (its third). The next release of bbPress, most likely to be a Release Candidate, is being delayed in order to pull in more user feedback on the current working version. Specifically, project lead John James Jacoby is looking for feedback on a few key features of the plugin:

  • Page templates (naming, approach, etc.)
  • Multisite user behavior
  • Search behavior
  • Plugin settings

You folks are great at leaving feedback and sharing your thoughts, so why not go join in on the fun in this thread on bbPress.org? Many of you have given the new bbPress plugin a go since its beta release, and even many-er of you have participated in some basic end-user testing by joining in on the WPCandy forum (running bbPress, of course).

The new bbPress plugin, by the way, has now been downloaded over 16,000 times. Are you one of those? If you have a public instance of bbPress running on one of your sites, drop it in the comments so we can see it.

Introducing WPCandy Discussions, the (new) place to discuss WordPress

By 330 days agoJune 28, 2011

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I’m very excited today to introduce the brand new WPCandy forums, primed and ready for your words to fill them up. The forums are located at wpcandy.com/discussions, and you can join in the conversation if you have a WPCandy account (join here if you don’t yet).

The forums you will be most interested in are:

  • General Discussion: If in doubt, start here.
  • Demo Your Work: If you have a new plugin, theme, or service to show off, take it here and get some feedback. Believe it or not, everyone around here just wants to see awesome stuff made.
  • WPCandy website help/bug reporting: There is now a place for questions if you run into an issue on the site, or have a problem with your Pro, or something like that. In other words, bugs come here to die.

You can jump in and talk right now, if you like. Just create a WPCandy account and have at it.

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bbPress plugin beta 3 is now available

By 346 days agoJune 13, 2011

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If you’ve been keeping up-to-date with news regarding bbPress 2.0 (aka the plugin version of the bbPress forum software), then you’ll be glad to hear John James Jacoby just released beta 3 which can be downloaded now from the WordPress plugin directory.

Over the past 2 and a half weeks, project lead Jacoby has been taking in even more user feedback, committing new code, cleaning up old parts of code, and is happy to report:

Available immediately is bbPress 2.0 Beta 3, chock full of fixes and enhancements to help smooth out the integration of bbPress into your existing WordPress.org powered site. Your feedback has been super helpful, and there’s been so much testing we think a sarcastic cake-promising robot may be involved somewhere.

That’s right. More bbPress and a Portal reference.

Some of the fixes and enhancements for bbPress 2.0 beta 3 involve Akismet integration, improvements to the importer, fixes to the inconsistant breadcrumb behavior, shortcodes for login, register, and lost password forms, improvements to multisite support and more.

The bbPress plugin is still on schedule to be released with WordPress 3.2, so the more testing that can be done before hand, the better. We know DevPress are using bbPress on their newly revamped site, have you tried it yet?