There’s no way for me to contain either my excitement or anxiety when I say that bbPress 2.6.0 is available now! πŸŽ‰

This version of bbPress has been in development for just a bit under 6 years (yikes!) over which 420 tickets were resolved via 1737 individual code commits.

There are so many improvements that a changelog hardly seems fitting for this post, but the major features include per-forum moderation, a bunch of new platforms to import from, and an extensible engagements API that now powers the relationships between users, forums, topics, replies, subscriptions, and favorites.

At the time of this writing, bbPress is installed on approximately 336,000 WordPress installations, and is the most widely installed forum software in the world (according to BuiltWith.com and other sources.) Several of those are right here on bbPress.org, BuddyPress.org, and WordPress.org, the later of which includes a few dozen separate languages for non-English speaking communities of contributors all over the world.

The elephant in the room… the reason that 2.6.0 took so long, is pretty simple. bbPress has a small contributor pool, and none of us are 100% dedicated towards it. The project gets very little community feedback, which makes it hard to know if everything is working perfectly, or nobody is testing it at all.

So… 4 less-than part-time folks supporting over 300k sites, each with their own thousands of users, depending on us.

The pressure is high, and the chamber is echo’y, and as my own career has progressed these past 13 years, the numbers above make me increasingly nervous.

And the longer something takes to do is the higher the expectations are, and I personally locked up pretty hard multiple times on whether done was done enough to be trusted by so many having been tested by so few.

But… good things come to those who wait, and I’m sincerely sorry to have kept any of you waiting for too long.

bbPress 2.6.0 has been running smoothly on these forums since day 0. It’s stable, pretty, and a joy to use. We know you are gonna love it!

πŸπŸ’š