Since I last posted about bbPress, my attitude towards it has changed, somewhat.
bbPress out of the box is ONLY a forum. there are almost 0 features. No personal messaging, no avatars, no bbcode, no quoting, no posting images… you get the idea. Fortunately there are many plug-ins to alleviate the perceived shortcomings of bbPress. So after 7 hours of installing testing, and retesting, I have a fully functioning, full featured (as far as what I use, and recommend as general features) bbPress stack. There is one drawback. Some of the plug-ins require adding their php function calls to the theme template. So if I preinstall those plug-ins, the stack is stuck with the theme I choose.
As I said my attitude towards bbPress has changed, and it has. I am not worried about it being unusable, there are plug-ins. All in all I like bbPress okay, as opposed to not thinking it was the forum for the job. I say I like okay, because it is to modular. The themes are not just css files that change stuff around (those do exist). The ones I looked at are entirely new php files. Some add new features (I think new stuff is only for plug-ins, personally), and some don’t. But each time I switch themes, I have to reinstall several plug-ins. I think that is inefficient, but I didn’t write the code, and until I can think of a better way, I will use it like it is.