Short version: does anyone have any thoughts on either a replacement for bbPress that will allow me to keep data intact, or any thoughts on how safe it’s likely to be long-term to keep using a plugin that has Matt Mullenweg personally as one of the two lead devs?
I spent yesterday doing some overdue maintenance and upgrades on several sites, including switching the php version to 7.2, doing a very overdue switch to SSL on older ones, that kind of thing. On all of my ClassicPress sites, everything worked beautifully. On the sole WP blog, however, I’ve had a few errors creep in. I’d really rather just switch it to CP!
The only reason I haven’t is nervousness about bbPress. My users are going to be unhappy if I lose the current forum contents. Most of them refuse to use social media and they’re going to refuse to use any forum requiring registering/logging in elsewhere, which is why I set it up with bbPress to begin with.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, I’d be very grateful!
I have a site using bbPress that I converted to CP. Everything looks to be in order, though I haven’t done extensive testing. It’s only rarely used by a small association, so in my case it’s not exactly critical.
Provided bbPress retains backward compatability to WP 4.9 I think you should be OK with CP version 1, which will have long term support.
You could switch to Discussion Board. You could import your forum posts by switching them to using a new post type with Post Type Switcher. Just make a backup of your current forum posts before you try switching them.
The bigger issue is with forum comments and replies, both of which (I believe – I don’t use bbPress) also use their own custom post types in bbPress, whereas Discussion Board treats them both as comments.
I have one Wordpress site with bbpress and was wondering the same thing. I think my solution will be to import the bbpress into Xenforo and then use a xenforo Wordpress bridge. OK, this will cost me for the xenforo licence and for the bridge plugin but in the long run it will be so much better being a proper grown up forum software.
BUT
will the xenforo/WP bridge work with Classicpress I wonder? - time to ask those devs.
BBpress is dead as an actively maintained platform. The last update was released 2 years ago and the next release has been in Release Candidate status for about 18 months.
It doesn’t appear as if any support is being provided by any Automattic staff on the BBPress support forms.
I’d move from it if it wasn’t for a couple of additional plugins that provide functionality that doesn’t seem to be available for any other forums.
Don’t believe everything you read on Wordpress.org, check the official BBPress changelog.
and
The wordpress.org BBPress page has been showing ‘updated 3 months ago’ for about 6 months. It should really have the wordpress abandoned plugin warning at the top of the page that other plugins get:
’ This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress . It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.’
