By Something we’re currently investigating for blogs.kent is the (relatively) new bbPress plugin to enable simple collaborative forums. In case you don’t already know, bbPress was a stand-alone forum system. But Matt Mullenweg – the guy who started WordPress – put out a call for ideas about where to take bbPress and together the community decided to develop bbPress as a plugin, allowing anyone to have forums as an integral part of their blog.
One thing we wanted to do was use WordPress’s excellent filter system to intercept every forum post and reply and put in our own “report concern” button, just like we do on our blog posts. WordPress normally lets you intercept posts with the the_content filter. But for bbPress posts it’s a little different. Try bbp_get_reply_content instead.
This wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to find out, but digging through the plugin code helped. There’s also a handy list of bbPress hooks, although this doesn’t really help too much working out what they do.
Anyway bbPress looks like a really promising move towards WordPress becoming a more richly featured social media and CMS tool rather than just a blogging platform. Watch this space for announcements about what we’ll be doing with bbPress.
I’d very much be interested in using something like this for teaching. I ran a class forum through Moodle last year where students on HI416 Victorian Britain were assessed (in part) through their posts and comments to the forum. In the future I would like to make this activity public (in the form of a blog), with the pedagogical rationale of improve writing skills and opening our discussions to a wider community of scholars.
I look forward to hearing more about the implementation of bbPress.