Data Circle

bbPress 0.72 via Photo Matt

bbPress, the software used to power the WordPress support forums, has finally had an official release after two years in development. I’ve been waiting for a proper release of bbPress for some time, so needless to say I’m very happy to see it finally making it out of beta status.

bbPress includes some interesting and useful features that some other forum systems lack. It’s biggest selling point is of course the close integration with WordPress (though it’s possible to run the forums without a blog if you so desire), but it also has built-in support for Akismet, the comment spam solution which seems to be very effective—bar the occasional downtime and false negatives.

I wish I had time to get involved with the development of bbPress as I think it has the potential to be a really useful piece of software, but for the moment I’ll have to be content just using it instead.

Google have recently launched a new tool for searching through the massive repositories of source code available on the Internet, though with the rather unimaginative name of Google Code Search.

I’m particularly impressed that the search includes CVS and Subversion repositories, as this is far more useful than a general Google search which would only really cover code embedded in web pages or perhaps PDF/Word documents. Being able to use regular expressions and restrict searches to particular licences, files and packages is also highly useful.

Further information

• Search the world’s public source code