bbPress theme project: Announcement

[ryanhellyer]

We're starting a new community based project here at SitePoint. We will be creating a new theme for the bbPress forum project. All SitePoint community members are invited to provide input and help out with various aspects of the project.

For those of you don't know much about bbPress, it is a PHP/MySQL based forum software developed by Automattic, developers of the well known WordPress CMS. http://bbpress.org/ describes it as:


The current bbPress default theme is known as Kakumei, and although it was cutting edge when first released, it is showing it's age and we hope that by creating a new theme with high quality, logical coding that we can provide a solid base theme for others to develop from.




Why are we doing this?
bbPress is a good quality open sourced software which is lacking in available themes. We hope that we will be able to create something which will allow others to more easily develop their own themes for bbPress by providing a quality theme with a solid code base. Plus, hopefully people will want to use the theme as is for their own sites.


Plan of attack:
Topics announcing the development of various sections of the project will be announced over the next few days. The current plan of attack is as follows:

1. Create Wire-frame design, UI elements included
2. Base HTML/CSS coding (Layout, Typographical hierarchy etc.)
3. Additional programming - some features previously only available in bbPress as plugins will be added directly to the theme
4. Competition on 99designs will be used to choose the final 'look' of the theme
5. bbPress templates - the HTML/CSS and PHP will be inserted into a fresh bbPress theme
6. Naming - we'll need a catchy name for the theme, so get your thinking caps on!
7. Beta testing phase - we'll iron out the bugs ready for the official release

Demo
Since we haven't started yet we don't have a demo of anything yet, but once we do it will be available for testing at http://bbtheme.net/. We currently have a default bbPress installation on there with a few extra features added in to demonstrate how 'plugin-like' functionality can be included directly in the theme.


A few details
The theme will be designed to work with bbPress version 1.0.

The theme will use an XHTML1.0 Transitional Doctype. The reason we are not using a strict doctype is because many plugins for bbPress do not output strict code. All code used in the theme will be strict compatible so simply changing the Doctype will allow individual users to change to a strict doctype if they desire.

All code will be as semantical as possible. This includes using an HTML table for the board index.

Keeping in line with the bbPress project itself, the them will be released under a GPL license.


Who makes the final decisions and maintains the code?
We'd like to make everything totally democratic but unfortunately there is often a fine line between democracy and chaos, so the final call on decisions relating to the project will be made by SitePoint staff based on input we gather from the SitePoint community as a whole.

No code has been written yet, but ryanhellyer is maintaining the (currently empty) demo site. A Google Code project has been created to manage the code.


Team Leaders
The following team leaders have been nominated to help organise their respective areas of the themes development:

• HTML/CSS - Dan Schulz
• Design - kohoutek
• PHP - TBA
• bbPress templates - Ryan Hellyer

[RetroNetro]

Interesting!

[Dan Schulz]

That it is, Ben. That it is.

[ryanhellyer]

The wireframe/UI side of the project has now been launched:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show....php?p=4335792

Head on over to give your input

[akritic]

Cool! This should prove to be an interesting project.

[molona]

Interesting indeed

Great job Ryan

[Blake Tallos]

I'll help.

[ShayneTilley]

It's great to see this project go ahead. I'm really looking forward to both helping where I can, and seeing what we can come up with.

[kohoutek]

I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

[ryanhellyer]

Good to see such positive comments

Head over to the initial stages topic to give some input into the basic wireframe/UI of the new theme:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show....php?p=4335792

[kikykuang]

Very interested in, it should be very useful to me

[ryanhellyer]

I'll help.

I see you have a title of "Javascript Monstaa". Would you be keen to help out with some of the javascripting that needs done? Off the top of my head, I can think of a bunch of javascript which will need optomised, things like quick quotes, bbCode system etc. The extra (non-standard Kakumei) features in the demo site (http://bbtheme.net/) have just been hacked together by myself out of bits of bbPress plugin code. I'm sure there's probably much better ways of doing things. In particular I assume many will prefer the idea of using jQuery for much of the scripting (seems to be the "in thing" these days).

FYI, I know absolutely nothing about javascript.

[rhysboy84]

I'll gladly help out. I'm familiar with bbPress (though mainly plugins, rather than themeing, but I have themed a few times with bbPress) .

I think I'll be best helping adding functionality directly to the theme that was unavailable without plugins (particularly if they're my plugins! )

Does bbpress allow a functions.php similar to wordpress themes?

[ryanhellyer]

I'll gladly help out. I'm familiar with bbPress (though mainly plugins, rather than themeing, but I have themed a few times with bbPress) .

Awesome

I found this list on your site:

I think I'll be best helping adding functionality directly to the theme that was unavailable without plugins (particularly if they're my plugins! )

reCAPTCHA bbPress - Prevent spam registrations with reCAPTCHA technology.

Show Top Posters - Increase visitor participation by showing the top posters on your sidebar.

Image Resizer - Resize posted images on the fly with this plugin.

Do you think the recaptcha plugin would be something suitable for integration into a theme? It seems that bbPress should have some sort of anti-bot-registration system in place by default and we could potentially provide that within the theme itself.

Does bbpress allow a functions.php similar to wordpress themes?

Yes, the latest version does. I don't think they added support for that until recently though.

[rhysboy84]

Do you think the recaptcha plugin would be something suitable for integration into a theme? It seems that bbPress should have some sort of anti-bot-registration system in place by default and we could potentially provide that within the theme itself.

Possibly.

It does require an account being had at recaptcha for them, so they'll need a recaptcha + wordpress.com account (for akismet). Could end up confusing them. A straight captcha in my opinion would be more user friendly.

It always surprises me how images aren't automatically included with bbPress. I know that the "Allow Images" plugin isn't compatible with the latest version, I think by including the functionality of this plugin would be more beneficial than recaptcha to begin with. What does everybody else think?

[ryanhellyer]

Ah, I just thought recaptcha was a regular old captcha plugin. On looking at their site it does seem to be a great little tool they've made there. But unfortunately not suitable for a default installation.

I've added a crude bot-test to the demo site, but some sort of catcha would be good. Would that be difficult to implement within a theme?

EDIT: I missed this bit, in which case yes, I think that would be a better option than recaptcha.

It always surprises me how images aren't automatically included with bbPress. .... I think by including the functionality of this plugin would be more beneficial than recaptcha to begin with. What does everybody else think?

I'm writing up a new post at the moment which will lay out the plan for the "plugin-like functionality" side of the project. I'll probably have it posted tomorrow or maybe the day after. The main thing we'll need to sort out is exactly what sort of functionality we want to include. We don't want to end up creating some giant monstrosity with every feature imaginable, but some of the standard features that 99% of all forum owners are going to want would make a lot of sense IMO.

[Blake Tallos]

I see you have a title of "Javascript Monstaa". Would you be keen to help out with some of the javascripting that needs done? Off the top of my head, I can think of a bunch of javascript which will need optomised, things like quick quotes, bbCode system etc. The extra (non-standard Kakumei) features in the demo site (http://bbtheme.net/) have just been hacked together by myself out of bits of bbPress plugin code. I'm sure there's probably much better ways of doing things. In particular I assume many will prefer the idea of using jQuery for much of the scripting (seems to be the "in thing" these days).

FYI, I know absolutely nothing about javascript.

Of course, I can help out with as much as I know.
Let's just hope these participators stand up and really get this project rolling. Theres a difference between what people say and what people do when working on Open-source Projects.

[Dressupgamer]

The theme is very simple.U must design it like web 2.0

[Dan Schulz]

That doesn't say much. Do you have any example forums or designs you like that you may want to incorporate into this?

[ryanhellyer]

I'm writing up a new post at the moment which will lay out the plan for the "plugin-like functionality" side of the project.

The post is now up in the PHP forum:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show....php?p=4338063

Head on over there if you would like to give some input into what is and isn't included in the theme.

[Thing]

Awesome project! I'm late to the party but ready to get involved!

I also plugged this on the SitePoint Podcast episode 22

[ryanhellyer]

I also plugged this on the SitePoint Podcast episode 22

Awesome! Thanks

[hiddenpearls]

I would like to help too.
how i can get involved in it ?

[rhysboy84]

Hi hiddenpearls,

Check out the two threads below and contribute to them. It's still very early on, but we'll go from there.

PHP: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show....php?p=4335792

Wireframe/UI: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show....php?p=4338063

[Mittineague]

I guess it's just me, but there seem to be a lot of "intro" type threads on the bbPress theme project. Is there a "main" or "home" thread that would be the preferred URL for any promo blog posts / tweets to send people to? This thread?
Any preferred "name" eg. "Sitepoint's bbPress Theme Project".