Jennifer M. Dodd yesterday shared a detailed plan to upgrade the WordPress.org support forums to bbPress 2.x. The forums, which are currently powered by the outdated bbPress 1.x, are difficult to maintain and lack the flexibility offered by bbPress 2.x. Upgrading is essential because it makes it easier for the forums to be maintained by the community.
The upgrade goal was set at the 2015 WordPress Community Summit, however, it has been delayed due to plugin compatibility issues:
“Part of the delay has been that the forums rely on many custom plugins to make them manageable; some of these plugins have already been ported to bbPress 2.x; the rest will be ported as part of Milestone 2 during the testing period on volunteer upgraded forums” Dodd said.
The upgrade requires all support forums and international forums be migrated from bbPress 1.x to bbPress 2.x, and all remaining plugins to be ported to bbPress 2.x and released under the GPL. In addition, support forums will need to be integrated with the theme and plugin directories via custom taxonomies.
Dodd broke it down into a seven-step plan:
- Milestone 0 (May 25): Create a forum provisioning plugin that allows quick creation of forum sites.
- Milestone 1 (June 3): Migrate three existing bbPress 1.x forums to bbPress 2.x.
- Milestone 2 (July 1): Remaining plugins must be ported to bbPress 2.x while testing performance on upgraded bbPress 2.x forums.
- Milestone 3 (July 15): Remaining international forums must be migrated to bbPress 2.x.
- Milestone 4 (July 22): Create theme and plugin taxonomy handling for support.
- Milestone 5 (August 8): Sample data must be migrated for support, plugins, and themes forums and the tested and iterated on plugin and theme integration.
- Milestone 6 (August 19): Migrate support forums.
While upgrading is not a simple task, Dodd’s timeline with detailed milestones sets expectations and creates a more streamlined process. You can track the progress of each milestone at https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/.
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