bbPress comes from Automattic, the people that do the insanely popular WordPress (WP) blogging system. It’s the newest of the four systems reviewed here and hasn’t quite reached version 1.0.

bbPress asks:

Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked?

and then promises to solve all those problems. It does a creditable job, too.

If you’re familiar with WP, bbPress won’t bring many surprises. The admin interface is very similar to WP’s, with a simple dashboard and tabs for managing users, forums, settings, themes, etc. Like all the other systems reviewed here, the visual design of bbPress can be customised using themes and its functionality can be extended with plugins. bbPress manages these in a similar way to WP, though you can’t use WP’s themes and plugins, naturally.

Basic administration is simple and unfussy. Adding a new forum takes nothing more than typing its name and clicking Add. Rearranging the order of forums on the home page is done with a lovely Ajax interface that allows you to drag your forums into the order you require, then click Save. Why should it ever be harder than this?

bbPress is designed to integrate neatly with a WP installation and thus provide forum features to a blog site. You can link a bbPress and WP system together to share a common set of users and enable single sign-on across the whole site. For the millions of WP users out there this may well be bbPress’s killer feature. For everyone else, it can safely be ignored. bbPress runs fine as a stand-alone system.

Another big win for bbPress is its use of Gravatars, a remotely-hosted system for managing user avatars (profile pictures) that can be accessed by any website. Users sign up to Gravatar and upload a photo to associate with their email address. After that, their photo will be displayed on any website that uses Gravatars. As it’s a free, open and very simple system to implement it’s widely seen, including in WP (and on the comments on this very blog). Like bbPress, Gravatar is also part of the Automattic family and it’s good to see common, generic functionality like avatars implemented through a universally accessible remote service rather than embedded into individual packages.

bbPress provides a good, clean default theme that is streets ahead of all the other systems reviewed here. In part it has the advantage of doing less and therefore having less administrative debris to clutter the screen and distract the user from the real content. Also, it mostly eschews the heavy boxes and grids designs of other systems in favour of something lighter and more restrained. While every system’s themes can be replaced and modified, the default theme sets the tone and expectations for the rest of the system. bbPress looks clean and contemporary out of the box, which is more than can be said for many others.

The interface for members is generally clean and sound but the post editor seems to lack common functionality like being able to post hotlinked images and quoting of other members’ posts. Bare URLs are converted to active links and you can use a handful of HTML tags to style your post: a, blockquote, code, em, strong, ul, ol, li. No BBCode here, which is a relief. I never did quite see the value in rewriting a wonky version of HTML with square brackets when properly sanitised HTML can do the job just as well. There’s no rich text editor and sadly no support for simplified markup systems like Markdown and Textile. Perhaps these will come before version 1.0. It may be possible to implement these via plugins.

While bbPress adopts a common forum structure as seen on all apps like this, it also emphasises the use of tags to categorise topics. I really don’t like this. Members should be concentrating on writing content, not organising it with metadata. While the tagging system can safely be ignored, the fact that it’s there means it will probably be used by many, adding to the user’s cognitive load when writing a new post and no doubt quite confusing inexperienced users. In my experience of popular sites that use tags such as Flickr and Delicious, many people still don’t really understand how to write tags well. Though they add value to sites whose primary reason is to help aggregate content from large numbers of users, the structure of forums is well understood and adequate. It’d be good to see tagging taken out of bbPress’s core and available as a plugin for those that want it. I suspect most won’t.

Overall, bbPress benefits from being a relatively new system and therefore being able to avoid the technical and functionality legacy issues that plague the older packages in this review. For WP users it’s a no-brainer. For everyone else, it’s definitely worth close investigation before you settle on a system for your new forum.

Version: 0.9.0.2

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Let’s hope version 1.0 can add on that extra star and that in three years’ time it isn’t a bloated 50-table behemoth.