bbPress turns 2 years old today!!!
It's been a big year with new features being added at a rapid pace thanks to hard work by Sam and Mike. It's an easy guess that we should see a stable 1.0 beta by the end of 2008.
But don't let the modest sounding "1.0" fool you, it's practically a "2.0" inside with all the changes since 0.9 including BackPress integration (merges core functions from WordPress) and an XML-RPC api like WordPress as well.
While Matt Mullenweg (Automattic/WordPress founder) created bbPress during Christmas 2004 to power WordPress.org, version 0.7.2 (nicknamed “bix”) was only officially released for public consumption on Saturday October 14th 2006 making it two years old today.
Regardless of being summarily deleted from Wikipedia this year, bbPress has never been more popular. I've been tracking bbPress growth via the Top 100 and Top 1000 lists for over a year now and this month shows the list surging to nearly 5000 forums, with bbPress being used in over 80 countries and in dozens of languages.
Roughly 10 sites a day have installed bbPress over the past two years and over 70% them continue to use it. The largest bbPress forum is about to break a million posts by the end of the year and just to be on the Top 100, a forum now needs at least 7000 posts.
bbPress hosted forums via TalkPress (ala WordPress.com) are on the horizon, and with new forum conversion software being developed and more plugins and themes available than ever before, bbPress will definitely make it's mark in 2009 and should have a very exciting third year!