WordPress.org Forums Upgrade

The WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ support forums are currently powered by a very outdated version of bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. 1.x. Per the 2015 WordPress Community Summit, the forums need to be upgraded to bbPress 2.x so that they can easily be maintained by the community. 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.

Scope

  • Upgrade the support forums and international forums from bbPress 1.x to bbPress 2.x.
  • Port any remaining plugins from bbPress 1.x to bbPress 2.x and release them under the GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples..
  • Integrate the support forums with the theme and pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party directories via custom taxonomies.

Below is a general overview of the steps necessary to upgrade all of the forums on WordPress.org to bbPress 2.x from bbPress 1.x. Much of the work will be involve exporting and updating large quantities of information in bbPress 1.x tables to the WordPress-compatible bbPress 2.x schema — in one case, more than ten million rows of topics and replies. For these steps, I will look at the existing bbPress upgrade converter available but may fall back to a clone and rewrite via the command-line, since the new forum tables will not be in use and can be locked for writes. The goal is to perform upgrades with a minimum of downtime by backfilling most of the forum data and then performing an incremental import to bring it up to date with the existing forum.

Proposal

Milestone 0: Due 2016/05/25

Create a forum provisioning plugin to allow quick creation of forum sites in the WordPress.org multisiteMultisite Multisite is a WordPress feature which allows users to create a network of sites on a single WordPress installation. Available since WordPress version 3.0, Multisite is a continuation of WPMU or WordPress Multiuser project. WordPress MultiUser project was discontinued and its features were included into WordPress core.https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network. environment.

Milestone 1: Due 2016/06/03

Migrate three existing bbPress 1.x forums to bbPress 2.x. The migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. process will need to scale to eventually handle the support forumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. (including plugins and themes). During the migration, verify that user capabilities, moderator capabilities, metadata, and encoding are preserved. Create any user metadata filters necessary to avoid overloading the master usermeta table with default values.

  • I’m looking for volunteer bbPress 1.x forums who would like to upgrade to bbPress 2. Qualifications include moderator consensus and having fewer than 10k combined topics and posts. Extended characters sets welcome (and encouraged) as part of this test group. Forums will be available for testing by moderators prior to being turned live, but this will be definitely be a betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. test environment.

Milestone 2: Due 2016/07/01

Port remaining plugins to bbPress 2.x while testing performance on upgraded 2.x forums.

Milestone 3: Due 2016/07/15

Migrate remaining international forums to bbPress 2.x.

Milestone 4: Due 2016/07/22

Create theme/plugin taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. handling for the support forum.

Milestone 5: Due 2016/08/05

Migrate sample data for support/plugins/themes forum. Test and iterate on plugin and theme integration.

Milestone 6: Due 2016/08/19

Migrate support forums.

Stretch Goal

There are many open Trac tickets for the forums that have been waiting on the upgrade to bbPress 2.x.

I’ll be available on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. in the #meta channel. Progress on each milestone will be documented in Trac and in an accompanying P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. post. If you have any questions or concerns, just reach out here in the comments or in #meta on Slack.

#forums, #i18n