The WordPress.org support forums are currently powered by a very outdated version of bbPress 1.x. Per the 2015 WordPress Community Summit, the forums need to be upgraded to bbPress 2.x so that they can easily be maintained by the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 GPL.
- Integrate the support forums with the theme and plugin 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 multisite environment.
Milestone 1: Due 2016/06/03
Migrate three existing bbPress 1.x forums to bbPress 2.x. The migration process will need to scale to eventually handle the support forum (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 beta 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 taxonomy 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 Slack in the #meta channel. Progress on each milestone will be documented in Trac and in an accompanying P2 post. If you have any questions or concerns, just reach out here in the comments or in #meta on Slack.