[wp-hackers] [GSoC Proposal] bbPress ported to a WordPress plugin

[Bill Sullivan]

Hello everyone,

I'm working on writing a proposal for Google Summer of Code for
developing bbPress as a plugin for a WordPress blog. I'd really
appreciate any feedback anyone has for the below proposal. I'm
including the project and portion of the schedule of deliverables.


Project Proposal:
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I propose to adapt the bbPress project as a WordPress plugin. I would
like to make forums available to bloggers to allow discussions to grow
outside the context of specific blog post. Relatedly, I am very
curious to see how comments and forums could complement each other or
possibly merged. It seems reasonable to imagine that an interesting
discussion in a blog post's comments could branch off and continue
effectively as a forum discussion and I would like to experiment with
some designs that would enable that.

As stated, this project is meant to be a plugin for WordPress.

I expect this project to be a challenge to my database design and UI
design skills, as the possible intermingling of comments and forums
present some interesting and potentially difficult problems. I am also
curious to see what kinds of administration problems will be brought
up by adding forums to the WordPress admin (wp-admin) pages. I expect
to get a lot of inspiration (and hopefully lots of actual code) from
the work already done to integrate standalone installations of bbPress
and WordPress.

If the project is not fully successful, I still hope that my work
could be used in bbPress itself, if only by pointing out whatever
issues prevent me from adapting it as a plugin.
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Schedule of Deliverables
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I would like to have successfully ported the forums themselves over to
WordPress by the halfway point and then spend the rest of the Summer
working on making the administration of the forums as usable as
possible.
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Thanks,

Bill Sullivan
http://enkrates.com