I’ve been rather eager to give “bbPress”:http://bbpress.org a go. I’d downloaded a copy a while back – around version 0.4, I think – and set it up but wasn’t overly thrilled with it at the time. It was still too new, too limited, with little plugin or theme support. It’s at version 0.8 now with a bit more plugin support than it had before. Themes are still a little harder to come by, unless you want to take a stab at hacking out your own (which I could probably do but which would probably take me forever and a day until I could figure out what the heck I was doing).
Trouble is, I also don’t really have much use for a discussion board at this point. I’m already “running one”:http://open-dialogue.com/forum that sees zero traffic these days since all the regulars sort of lost interest and moved on to other things. So most of the things I would use a discussion board for now I accomplish through this blog or any of the handful of others I currently run. Still, I think it would be fun to set bbPress up, figure out how to integrate with my primary “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org installation, which is something I’ve always wanted to have – use the blog as my primary sounding board, have a bit of discussion start out there, and then as new content goes up on the main page, move discussions over to the forum. But that’ll likely never happen.
Still, the geek in me warms to the idea, so I may yet hack around and see what I can come up with. I’ve been kind of waiting for bbPress to go at least version 1.0 and hopefully see it take off enough that developers start building new plugins and themes to really make it to discussion boards what WordPress is to blogging.
I _am_ curious, though – is there any topic (or set of topics) that would draw you to a particular discussion board?
bq. I am curious, though – is there any topic (or set of topics) that would draw you to a particular discussion board?
Huh, apparently not. Pity.
I have connected my download of bbPress to my WordPress. Have you done that yet?