Evolution of RS Discuss

I don’t know if I should call this a plea, a proposition or a suggestion but here goes…

I’m sure there’s a lot of you in the WordPress community who have some sort of forum software connected to your WordPress site/blog. You might be running punBB, phpBB, SMF, Vanilla, bbPress or one of the forum plugins activeted directly from the WordPress backend such as Simple Forum or XDForum.

For those of you who’ve messed around with the plugin versions of different forum software I’m also quite sure that you’ve stumpled across RS Discuss, developed by Rob Sargant.

This plugin, which is still in beta, was last updated 2006-08-03 and it makes me sad and go boom boom with my head into the wall.

You see, and no offense to Simple Forum and XDWeb, this is probably the most sweet, lightweight and usable forum plugin for WordPress to this date, at least when it comes to what I want from a forum: create multiple forums, rss-subscribtion to both topics and forums, search, user profiles and… well, that’s about it and that’s what I like. Simple, short and sweet. Oh, and it integrates beautiful in your current WordPress theme which means no more double theming for both your site AND your forum.

On top of this, it has probably the best backend administration of all the forum plugins I’ve tried and the installation always works like a charm.

However, since it was developed for WordPress 2.0, or perhaps 2.1, there are some issues with the current version. I’m running it on WordPress 2.3 and everything is fine when it comes to installation, creating and maintaining forums in the backend, starting and replying to topics and rss-subscribtion to forums and topics.

However, there are two things that doesn’t work. The first one is viewing user profiles and the second one is searching. And this kind of bothers me since I asume it’s not that big of a deal to correct.

I looked over the code and tried to find the errors but unfortunately it was a little bit above my coding knowledge.

Soooo… to conlude this huge wall of text my suggestion is as follows:

Would anyone be interested in continuing the development of RS Discuss, of course with the permission from Rob Sargant, or perhaps just take a look at the code and see what’s bothering the search and profile pages? If you do I will love you long time! Also, if anyone decides to carry on the development, an edit post-function for registered users would be nice to have.