A new release! bbPress 0.8.2 has a quite a few changes and features. While you’re downloading, check out the cool new stuff.

Hierarchical Forums

Forums can now be grouped hierarchically (that is, forums can have “children”). To organize your forums, go to Content -> Forums in your bbPress’ admin panels, click “Edit Forum Order” and drag the rows around: up, down, left and right.

Make sure to “Save Forum Order” when you’re done.

“Slug” based permalinks

No longer are you constrained to topics and forums with permalinks that look like http://example.com/topic/14/. By turning on slug based permalinks, your URLs will be generated from the forum’s or topic’s title like http://example.com/topic/see-you-in-hawaii/.

Also, all of bbPress’ different permalink structures (/topic.php?id=14, /topic/14/, /topic/see-you-in-hawaii/) are interchangeable; you can switch to whichever structure you like and all your old links will still work (but see the upgrade instructions in this post).

Plugin Management

Plugins can now be activated and deactivated with the click of the mouse in bbPress 0.8.2. Just go to Site Management -> Plugins in your bbPress’ admin panels. To be activated, however, every plugin must have a “plugin header” that includes at least the plugin’s name. Here’s an example.

/*
Plugin Name: Name of your plugin required
Plugin URI: Plugin’s website
Description: Short description of your plugin
Author: Your name
Author URI: Your website
Version: Current version number of your plugin
*/

As a bonus, “hidden” feature, plugins whose file name begins with an underscore (_) do not need to be activated; they will be loaded automatically and do not require a plugin header.

A few small things

Here a sampling of some of the other minor changes in bbPress 0.8.2.

• More tag cloud formatting options
• Improved consistency in tagging
• bbPress’ default Kakumei theme combines the list of “Your Tags” and “Others’ Tags”.
• No more annoying feed: before all of your RSS feed links. The feed: psuedo-standard was a clever idea, but never really caught on.
• Moderators and Admins are considered “trusted” and will never have their posts marked as spam.
• Admins can change other user’s passwords.
• More filters and actions for plugin authors
• Faster database queries

Upgrade instructions

The only tricky thing with this release is plugins. After upgrading, you’ll have to go to your bbPress’ Site Managment -> Plugins admin panel and activate the plugins you want activated. As mentioned above, all plugins must have a plugin header before they even show up in the plugin list. If you have a plugin that’s not showing up, either give it a plugin header or rename it so that it’s filename begins with an underscore.

Also, if you’re turning on slug based permalinks, you may need to regenerate your .htaccess file’s rewrite rules.

More info

For the nitty gritty, check out these lists of bugs fixed and code changed [2].