[buddypress-trac] [BuddyPress Trac] #5351: bp-forums retirement

[buddypress-trac]

#5351: bp-forums retirement
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 Reporter:  johnjamesjacoby  |      Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)     |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |  Milestone:  2.0
Component:  Forums           |    Version:
 Severity:  normal           |   Keywords:
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 bbPress 2.x now completely handles BuddyPress integration on it's own.
 Around 95% of our 2014 survey respondents (that use forums) use bbPress
 2.x. It's time to consider what retiring the bp-forums component looks
 like.

 BP Forums is several years stagnant, and has been almost completely hidden
 from the UI for the past 12 straight months.

 The biggest win for removing bp-forums completely is finally getting rid
 of the Subversion externals. They are tedious to setup and maintain for
 each repository. bbPress also has a Subversion external to BackPress,
 which also has a Subversion external to the po/mo library. Chopping all of
 this out of BuddyPress completely will be quite liberating.

 A few ideas:

 == Leave the code in BuddyPress forever ==

 We've been fortunate so far and haven't needed to be as strictly committed
 to backwards compatibility as WordPress has. But, it won't always be that
 way, and we're quickly approaching our users having the expectation of
 stability first.

 If we go this route, we just hide the UI and pretend like the code doesn't
 exist anymore. I don't really like this idea, as it doesn't solve our
 Subversion external problem.

 == Move BP Forums into the Backwards Compat Plugin ==

 Back from the dead: http://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-backwards-
 compatibility/developers/

 This plugin was always intended to act as a shim for components that
 eventually get retired, so it's a logical choice. One problem with this
 approach is we'll need to update that plugin somewhat, to make it work at
 all with our new component selection UI, and also resurrects our old Wire
 and Status components, which I personally sometimes miss; leaving them
 under the rug means I forget how cool they were. :)

 == Move BP Forums into a new 2.0 shim plugin ==

 This lets us shed any other extra weight we think would make sense to
 remove from BuddyPress proper, mainly any deprecated functions files from
 several versions ago.

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Ticket URL: <https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5351>
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