In the span of seven days, I went from presenting design concepts to a room of Managuans to talking about distributed teams to a room of Winnipeggers. In my younger days I often wondered where my career would take me, but it was generally in metaphorical terms. Design, code and WordPress literally took me 3700 miles across the globe in a short week.

WordCamp Winnipeg kicked off Friday night at an Argentinian pizza joint. In the spirit of globe trotting, I was delighted to have Argentinian pizza in Canada. The food and beer were fantastic, but the company was really what made the evening special. Matt Wiebe, one of our near and dear former Triberians who is now an Automattician, was there as one of the hosts and organizers. In the early days of my freelancing career, Matt and I worked on many projects together – he often tasked with fixing my bad code and managing to make my designs coime to life somewhere near budget. In addition to Matt, Joey Kudish another favorite former Triberian cum Automattician had made the trip from his home in Vancouver. You know you’re in the right place when work trips = meeting old friends for beer.

WordCamp Winnipeg kicked off with a delightfully friendly introduction from organizer Don Betts. Traditionally, WordCamps have tended to focus on implementation strategies – whether they’re design, dev or business focused – they’ve generally got a how-to or a best-practices bent to them. WordCamp Winnipeg definitely continued that vibe with Peter’s Profiling WordPress Talk, Joey Kudish rocking Plugins 101, and Matt W’s Themeing 101 – but most interesting to me were the talks that differed from that model. Ian Stewart, someone whom I’ve always admired, opened the day with a personal story recounting his journey getting into web design and development. He hit on a mantra that is very near and dear to me, “Work Really Hard.” He spent all his free time reading, studying, and trying things. He shared all his work, and from that found more success. It was a wonderful way to open a conference, full of hope, optimism, and promise.

This was the second opportunity for me to see Peter’s Profiling WordPress talk, and I gotta say it gets better every time. The crowd was cracking up as he managed to find a way to talk about cacheing that not only kept me awake, but got laugh after laugh. If you haven’t seen it, it’s full of tips for improving the performance of your site and it’s got stuff for all skill levels.

Andrea Tetrault of Winnipeg Cycle Chick, and Tetro Design gave a fantastic talk on WordPress from the publishers point of view. She highlighted the impetus of,  growth, and opportunities that have sprung from writing her personal biking blog. It’s easy to lose site of the publisher’s role in this ecosystem as we focus on technology, interface, and business models. The value of writing, and the role of blogging were well represented here in Winnipeg, echoing themes that were well presented by Chris Ames and John Saddington at WordCamp Atlanta earlier this year (Chris’ talk in particular is one of my favorite conference talks of all time – Watch It).

Dave Pensato closed the day with a talk about where he sees the future of blogging. He asked incredibly big questions, and followed with some unique and interesting proposals. He also came back to this examination of the value of blogging. His ideas about how to approach social media, how to own your content, and how to build a true home on the web are really fascinating and I’m totally jazzed to see where he pushes them. This is a smart guy that I am going to be paying attention to.

All in all, a successful event. To future WordCamp organizers, the bookends – injecting some personal stories, and some bigger philosophical questions makes for a well rounded event. Love to see more of that.

It’s the night before our return departure from a weeklong business retreat in Nicaragua. I am excited to go home. I always am at the close of these trips – not because they’re not wonderful, but I’m a sucker for missing my wife, son, and stinky pooch.

This trip differed from many previous. We do this every quarter, and they’re generally pretty consistent. Where we usually drown in the minutia of spreadsheets, and ponder possible futures; this trip saw 22 hour code sessions, stress filled squables, and a strange and somewhat wonderous 2 days spent with Managuan developers at their inaugural WordCamp.

Retreats are often about clarity. It’s a chance to step back from our business and take stock of how it is impacting our lives, and what our intentions are for it. The drive from Managua to Rivas very clearly illuminated that clarity would not be on the agenda.

Nicaragua is beautiful. Surprisngly, it didn’t actually take long to escape the city. We dodged the hustle and bustle that comes with driving in a country that has less than strigent traffic laws, and quickly settled into our 2 hour road trip to Tola. We were delighted by the rambuctious rickshaws, and the aimless foals that wandered the sides of the streets. Steel sided shacks, and aged plaster buildings, once painted brightly, speckled the rural landscape, broken up on occaision by a small town defined only by an increase in density of the steelshacks and a fast food chicken place. I quickly fixated on a meme of documenting the many chicken joints that we would pass – Tip Tops, Narcy’s, Pollos Frit. A fun distraction.

We stopped for groceries in the city of Rivas. Visiting grocery stores in foreign countries is one of my favorite things. Pali, the Nicaraguan variety, was the smallest and simplest I’ve visited lacking in many of the packaged products that we had found in Liberia, Costa Rica last year. We grabbed some fruit, plaintains, sugared kids cereals, and a twelve pack of Tona – the local version of Budweiser. We didn’t stay long, and found the paved roads quickly gave way to gravel as we headed towards Tola and our beach destination.

It was this stretch of road where the level of poverty became hardest to miss. The rough roads often slowing us down, the lack of development highlighting the broken down homes that somehow managed to still stand – and be inhabited. Chickens, and pigs are all about. There are horses everywhere that stroll the streets casually, and cattle wandering where ever they please.

Everywhere, there are children.

They are always smiling, running, and playing. But often through trash lined gulleys, and homes that couldn’t possibly hold a bed for all that lived inside. I catch a glimpse of a naked boy, likely only a few months older than my own son. He’s playing in the dirt next to a small cot which is probably his bed.

The dusty roads, and sun soaked landscape, partched from the long dry season, give way to an ocean view. An ocean view that replaces the poverty view. Buena Onda – Good Vibes. Our home for the next week.

We work incredibly hard for the next seven days. The first day is 22 solid hours scouring many thousand lines of code. I am not an apologist for our businesses success. We acknowledge and appreciate the hand we were dealt, and strive to justify that headstart by doing good work in a respectful way. But I can’t shake the poverty out, it sits in the back of my head and makes it hard to focus on the task at hand.

We bicker and squabble. This is not uncommon for us. We’re opinionated and passionate people who trust each other enough to get snippy on occaision. We’re all more stressed than usual. Six months of overwork is starting to catch up with each of us. The tension is palpable, but it is broken and deflated with trips to the beach to surf.

The beaches are the things of Bruce Brown videos. A ‘crowded’ beach has a handful of people for every half mile of rich and sumptious black marble sand. Everyone seems tanned and toned, as waves at Popoyo draw dedicated surfers. Being neither taned, toned, nor a proper surfer adds to the out of body experience of it all. I successfully catch 2 waves the first outing. Earning each one by paddleing over, and often through the powerful white wash. Don’t picture me as Patrick Swayze – I’m barely to my feet on each one. But it is thrilling. Watching those who’ve dedicated their life to it from shore, surfing is graceful and even peaceful. It is very different from inside the wave. It roars around you. There is a single quiet moment. Right as the wave catches you. You are weightless. And then the roaring.

I’m able to video chat with Darice and Huck everyday. Seeing them, even choppy and pixelated, is wonderful. We’re not far enough into the technology for me to take it for granted. Huck overwhelms me with smiles when Facetime kicks in. He kisses the screen, and plays with the window that reflects back his own face. I’m not sure if he recognizes the face smiling at him as Papa or if it’s enough that I’m a goofy smiling face, but I choose to believe that he’s excited to see me. It’s Apple marketing at it’s finest.

We eat in a thatch covered dining room. The same two Nicaraguan women are at the counter and kitchen every day. It takes three days of my clumsy spanglish to get a smile. We get a mix of Nicaraguan food and typical American fair. One day I dine on a ham and american cheese sandwhich made on one of those triangular sandwhich presses I had in college, amazed that that piece of technology made it this far. The accents around us come from Europe, Australia, and Brazil – and of course there are more Californians beyond the two I brought with me.

I fall victim to the stomach issues that all travelers dread. My delicate American consititution not up for something that I took in. If Darcie had been with us, she certainly would have the hippie clay pills I poke fun at but so desperately need. The 24 flu actually serves as a nice break. It aligns with a random power outage through the whole area. The forced downtime gives us a chance to stop ‘doing’. The break from doing gives a chance to get past the stress bickering and we come out the other side productive and happy.

Our stay at the beach ends, punctuated by the first of the rainy season downpours. We make the drive back to Managua. Back to the city, back to work and WordPress and code and pixels. I’m not looking forward to it, spooked by a warning about the violence in Managua, and seeing our visit there as a distraction from peaceful focus on work that we found on the beach. We’re in Managua to participate in their inaugural WordCamp. This is one of many that I will attend and speak at this year: Atlanta; Minneapolis; Winnipeg; and Chicago.

Norman and his wife Doris pick us up at the hotel to bring us to dinner, but they need to stop off at home first. They are warm and inviting, and offer us a drink made of water, cocoa and cinnamon. Doris disappears to the back of the home seemingly to dress for dinner, and Norman wanders off leaving us to sit in their living room and take in our surroundings. It’s a modest home. It is at once open and airy, but also locked off from the rest of the city. There are a handful of mis-matched love seats, and small tchotchkes about. Norman is a sys admin, and sys admins are the same the world over. Laptops, cables, and drives cover a small desk. When contrasted with our own current search for a new home, where we debate over whether or not we need 2,000 square feet of space for three people, it leaves me feeling both lucky and wasteful.

We leave Norman’s for an asado – a traditional bbq. There we meet the rest of the organizers, and Karen Arnold the other American who has come to speak at the event. The anxiety of the day dissapates quickly. The people are friendly and warm. My lack of Spanish doesn’t seem to bother anyone. The food is delicious; a plate of grilled meats, rice and beans, and sweet plantains – one of my favorite foods. We all drink Tona, the beer of Nicaragua, and it is delicious and refreshing on the muggy night. Only 1-2 of the people there are WordPressers, which seems odd. They are all Debian folks, but each one references being involved with free software which is cool to hear. We bond over Drupal jokes, and tease the sys admins – the same things that happen at all WordCamps. Shane, always working, askes about needs and freelancing, while Peter just entertains with his big smile and goofy ways – stabbing two chunks of beef and dancing them across the table.

I’m speaking at the WordCamp. I hadn’t inteded or requested the opportunity, and my anxiety about not speaking the language kept me from being excited the morning of the event. Slowly but surely, a small crowd trickles in finally numbering about 60. I can follow enough of the presentations to know that they are detailed and smart. I make an internal commitment to giving my talk the same as I would in front of an english speaking crowd, but a short minute before I am to present, Karen sits down and tells me the organizer has asked her to translate for me. What would have been a 40 minute talk became a 17 minute stilted synopsis. It’s more of a Laurel and Hardy routine with Karen and I, but the concept gets across and I think that we come off as funny. I was able to include some screens that I knew were created by people who would be in attendence which prompts laughs and high fives.

There are handful of people in the audience who are obviously well versed in WordPress and if in the States would likely run or work at agencies we consider peers. Overwhelmingly though, it seems to be young people who are just curious. There is a father who saw an interview with Karen on TV and had brought his son – maybe 8 years old. The son fidgets with a phone, but is quiet and respectful for the entire afternoon. Shane runs through a heady presentation on using WordPress as a business in full Spanish. I know the content of the talk, even if I can’t follow along, and know that the message it contains is every bit as valuable here as at home.

After the event, we end up going out for Salvadorean pupusas and beer. Like any other conference, everyone seems relieved when it’s complete, excited to hang out and enjoy each other’s company without the anxiety of performance and organization hanging overhead. Being perfect hosts, they invite us for drinks and dancing after dinner but the three of us are done by that point. Cooked by a week of sun, socializing, work, and WordCamp, we find our way to the mall and grab tickets for the new Star Trek sequel. We close the week laughing to the “hablas klingon?” subtitles, suddenly finding the whole thing very funny.

Developer. Front End Dev. Designer. User Interface Designer. Javascripterino. We all have a place in the WordPress ecosystem. We contribute to core, the plugin/theme repos, help out on forums and attend WordCamps. There’s a new kid at the pool, and he’s ready to mix it up a bit. The Amalgamator.

Making things easy… too easy?

WordPress lowers the bar for creating digital work. It began by lowering the bar for content publishing, and has grown to enable users with relatively low technical skill sets to create remarkably powerful websites. This is one of the key reasons it succeeds as a platform. This ability to take mere mortals and make them website creating superfreaks is its most promising attribute. They can buy hosting, and one click install. They can hit up Themeforest and grab one of a million themes. They can peruse the plugin repo and configure the crap out of a settings panel. They can crop a logo in Photoshop, and set hex colors for links. They bootstrap stuff together using whatever combination of plugins, snippets and duct tape that they can find.

They don’t know what they don’t know

Amalgamators don’t know PHP. They could browse the codex but not know what the crap it means. They certainly don’t know how to properly enqueue a javascript file. They know copy. They know paste. When something goes wrong, they come looking for your email, support forum, and twitter feed.

You and I may scoff at this skill set. If you’re in the deep end of the pool, these amalgamators seem like needy, whiny jerks with no sense of appreciation for your hard work. Think for a moment about how their friends, family, and clients see them. Remember the average person doesn’t know what an .htaccess file is and couldn’t give two shits about it. WordPress has enabled these Amalgamators to create incredibly powerful, beautiful, and feature rich web sites. “You’ve got an idea for a terribly doomed to fail Pinterest clone? Great, let me show you my dear friend BuddyPress and 15 different plugins and this $45 theme. You dream the dream, and I can make it happen.”

The Gall!

We may see that as hubris. But frankly, that’s besides the point. When we nerd out about WordPress taking over the internet, it’s these Amalgamators that are making it happen. They’re the ones supporting the premium theme marketplace, and the burgeoning plugin marketplace. When a corporate middle manager sees his grandmother rocking a WordPress blog, and he needs to pick a cms for that big budget upcoming gig, do you think he’s going to favor Drupal?

We can look down on these Amalgamators, and dismiss them as annoying noobs. But I see myself in them. I see people that have drunk the kool-aid. They want to build wonderful things, just like we do. They want to help their clients achieve their dreams, just like we do. They want to do good work, just like we do. Maybe they’re over reaching, but I respect that. We do it all the time too.

I am trying to find a way to embrace these folks. Our own success is tied to theirs. We may not be able to help every one that posts on our forums, but we can respect all of them. I can give them props for dreaming the dream.

Amalgamators. We salute you. Welcome to the pool.

Peter has been yammering on and on about Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast & Slow. Rather than read the book, I hit up the Ted talk instead. Kahneman’s examination of the delta between experience and memory is rocking my socks off right now. The video was posted in 2010, so you know I’m right on the cutting edge here.

Here’s the gist in case you don’t have time to settle in for a complete viewing. There’s essentially two versions of me. The experiencing self – that’s the me that is actually chowing down on a delicious burger. The remembering self – that’s the me that is sitting back reviewing my instagrams memories of that delicious burger that I ate. According to Kahneman, these two versions of you have vastly different perceptions of happiness, and consequently different perceptions of pain.

“We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.”

His example paraphrased – You’re at a symphony, listening to beautiful music that you love for an hour. At the end, there’s an incredibly unpleasant loud shriek. You leave the evening and exclaim “my night was ruined.” When of course, you experienced 60 minutes of pure joy, and but a few minutes of unpleasantness. Your experiential self loved 60 min hated 2 min but your remembering self can only take away the completed story. It’s a solid explanation for why we’re all staring at our camera phones during life’s precious moments. Record and capture. It’s a technicolor memory on demand in my pocket that has a greater impact on my perception of happiness than the very experience itself.

How can we take this kind of understanding and apply it to what we do? We have long raging internal dialogs about how to create tools that delight our users. But I wonder if we get hung up on designing only for the experiencing self, and forget to pay attention to the take aways that the remembering self will leave with. How do we create not only delightful interactions, but delightful memories? I can see how a single UX fail could ruin an otherwise delightful experience, but how do I flip that thinking around? Do I aim for a single truly amazing feature or expereince, give them enough to make a memory or create a story behind, and let the rest settle into place behind it? Should the goal be 90% not-crappy with 10% amazeballs?

If my metrics revolve around user satisfaction and they only truly remember the 10%? This goes against my natural inclination to believe that our work should be amazing all the way through. That we should detail and lovingly craft every nuance of our interface. That we should spend countless hours designing and coding custom checkboxes and radio buttons…

I wish I could leave you with some bullet points, but this one ends with a head scratchers.

The topic of RFPs came up in our local WordPress user group a few weeks ago. They eat up a ton of our time, and more often than not result in absolutely squat. Worse than that, often I get the feeling that we never really had a shot at it in the first place. The evils of the RFP process have been well documented, and I don’t need to beat a dead horse.

For context, I just finished a proposal in response to an RFP. Between the four of us, we spent 4 hours on the phone with the client, 15 hours working on a vision and estimate, 6 hours writing the actual proposal and that was swift. It can be a ton of time. In our eyes, if you are going to go for it, then really go to go for it. Not giving it everything you got pretty much guarantees what ever effort you do give it to be wasted time.  That’s a whole lot of time that I could have been napping (or doing something else productive). So how do you decide when it’s worth it?

When to say yes

Our default answer to the RFP question is, “nah, we’re cool.” That said we do respond to them on rare occasion, and have landed wonderful gigs via them. We have a very simple litmus test for whether or not we should participate. “Can I make a buddy?” If there’s an opportunity to create a personal relationship as part of the RFP process, we’ll often go for it. If the RFP process ends with your proposal in a big pile of other proposals, then forget it. If you can connect with the decision maker, and personalize your submission your odds of success sky rocket.

How do you do this?

Ask questions. Lots of em. No matter how well written an RFP is, it likely is leaving out large aspects of the work. That’s why they’re hiring. They need vision and execution. Talk to the stake holders. Find the decision makers. See what the root problem is. Ask personal questions. Think about the number of times you’ve built a tool for someone and its actual purpose was to make their own job suck just a little bit less. If people resist this process, bail – you’re not going to win. On occasion, they’ll welcome you with open arms. Suddenly, you’re not just a faceless pdf in the stack. You’re Peter, the friendly dude who took the time to get to know how the project actually effects them.

How do we win?

Ask this. Straight up. “How do we win?” Ask it 3 times. It can be an awkward question. The first time that I saw Peter ask it, the look of befuddlement on the client’s face was hilarious. But then a surprising thing happened. They told us exactly how we could win. “Actually, price and features are fungible, what we really need to focus on is our launch date because we’ve got internal pressure to ship something. The team that can propose a solution that guarantees a launch date is the team that we’re going with.” Isn’t that a handy little piece of information when writing a proposal? If you work it just right, your response to an RFP becomes your first draft at a contract.

How much you got?

Don’t guess budgets. Ask. “So, what do you guys have in terms of budget?” If at first you don’t get an answer, ask again. Ask for t-shirt sizes. Tell them the project could cost between $10k and $500k depending on the scope, scalability, etc. That gives a set of low and high expectations to start with. Tell them that you’ve done similar projects for $150,000. If they flinch, then assure them that this can be done for less. At this point, since you’ve obviously gone over their limit, they will be much more likely to let you know what they are looking for.

If they really won’t reply, you can always use Shane’s backup plan. “Oh, so $150k is too much, how about $140k? $130k? $120k?…” If you can’t get a budget range then you’re talking with someone that looks at this process as some kind of Las Vegas bidding game that they can “win”. Forget that.

What do you think?

They worthwhile? Should I just suck it up as part of the dance that we all play?

Managing Support for a Premium WordPress Plugin with Rob La Gatta

Rob’s slides has an odd malfunction, so check out the slides while you listen. This is his first public talk to the WordPress audience and we are super duper proud of him.

Managing Distributed Teams with Shane Pearlman

Often the magic of a trip is in the moments in-between. Its the personal neuroses you share as the barriers break down over the 6th beer. It’s singing wheels on the bus and painting nails with a bunch of 3 year olds. Its screwing up your best card trick while everyone is watching and playing it off with panache. Its the warning before a lightning talk that this slide deck must never leave this room and will self destruct in … 10, 9, 8 … and knowing who’s presenting, you know he’s not kidding. You can get to know people pretty well with IM & skype video. You have regular conversation. You share stories. Thought, despite all the amazing innovations of this digital era, you still need to meet people face-to-face.

Peter nailed it.

If you lean off the balcony, you can see Land’s End, where two oceans meet. Julie & I walk down to the sand following our daughter as she practices her skipping. It is early morning and the sun is cresting over the ocean. Sassy (that’s my little lady) throws her sandals off, grabs her sand toys and settles down for a proper castle building session. We ease into seats next to Reid and Darcie, after sharing hugs with everyone. Chillaquilles Rojos please – my favorite breaky ever. The horse trading starts with the partners trying to decide what to do during the 1/2 day work-session and when they could break us free to go play. Another fabulous breakfast completed, sunscreen applied, plans to go snorkeling and paddle boarding arranged for later, and we grab the crew to kick off the days session. Hot tub, check. Laptops, check. Apple Care, check. Bring on the wisdom.

Let Me Break This Down For You

Each year (except last year as we were so overwhelmed with the influx of new babies) we take our core team somewhere warm and tropical to hang out and talk shop. We are a distributed team and often this is our first chance to meet face to face with new and even long time team members. It is a family event and most people bring the whole clan. We’ve been on easy trips to places like Hanalei, Hawaii & here in to Cabo San Lucas. Two years ago brought us to Sayulita, Mexico – a bit of an adventure as we had to ford rivers and drive up some pretty intense dirt and gravel roads to hit the chick little hotel we took over. The dancing horses, mariachis, fresh made churros and fun small surf made it all worthwhile. El Salvador, where our surf rack included 4 boards and 2 shotguns was a whole other story, and the island we rented in Panama was quite bad ass. I love these trips. We so deeply believe that the entire purpose of being in business for yourself is to shape the life you imagine. We’ve shaped Modern Tribe to deliver that. I love the adventure! And if no one gets pregnant in the next few month, I think we are due for a proper adventure on the next team trip.

L’Chaim, Good Food and Fun To You

Daniel wins the contest for most brutal trip, weighing in at 43 hours due to a missed flight with an 8 month old little lass. It is a good thing that he gets to put the somewhat mighty dollar to work while living in Argentina. We sit down for an hour, with our feet in the hot tub and look at architectural plans for the 3,000 sq ft home they are about to start construction on.

The fish tacos are good. Especially the smoked marlin taco, which is a whole culinary experience unto itself. A group peels off for an afternoon to take a traditional Mexican chili cookoff course. Chorizo making. Stuffed peppers omelet thing was yummy. We hit the supermarket on the way back. They have a band in the market and a guy on a loud speaker pitching products.

The team talks are timeless. You see, you’ve got 10 minutes to teach us something… Go!

Peter gives us a tour of creating digital music using an ipad. We groom a horse with Leah, taste a flight of wine with Ryan & explore human memory hacking with Tim. Sassy decides to join me for my talk and we dive into the basic of real estate investing. Kyle clowns it up, followed by baroque music theory as a parallel to code design patterns by Jonathan, beer brewing with Lucas, and love and communication with Brad. We are lead through the journey of Rob’s food truck experiment, and why not to start your own. We really dig deep and examine motivation as we go from couch to marathon with Reid. We promised not tell you about Daniel’s, suffice to say that it was ridiculously funny. You should be here. Come the next zombie apocalypse, I have the edge up.

After a bunch of debate between a drinking bacchanalia on a pirate ship and a full seafood catered dinner and bonfire on the beach, the booze cruise looses out. The food is a remarkable surprise. All you can eat jumbo shrimp, steak, lobster,  marlin, chicken, and vegetables. The kids run around, well most crawled, and  I fire up the beach bonfire. Someone offers pink strawberry marshmallows. Not half bad. The families with young kids slowly peel off to leave the die hards and me, as my wife is being super awesome. We pull up two pineapples and grill them. I coat one in marshmallows and create a crisp candy shell. In the background the bar tender pours fire from his bottles while drunks shout in glee.

To Good Friends

Something must be in the water. For some reason, perhaps due to the youth of our industry, or the distributed nature of our endeavor, we keep hitting similar life milestones throughout the team. Despite a 12 year age window, we had 7 babies on the team in 2012. Those babies sure do change the dynamic of these trips. And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m surrounded by artful people who really care about building great things. They are happy, helpful, curious and accountable. I am grateful.

To great families, to kind people, to awesome teams living the life. And to a new adventure next year…

Curious about why we do this crazy and expensive jaunt abroad? Peter laid it out nicely in our second annual retreat summary.

bbPress side of things

Let’s concentrate first on how the bbPress search should work. Specifically, what should you get when you search for a keyword. There seems to be three main approaches:

Search all, return all

When you search for a keyword, bbPress looks for its custom post types (Forums, Topics and Replies) and will return all items that match the keyword. It should show in the search results template what kind of element each link corresponds to. Maybe it’d make sense to show results for Forums at the top, and Topics+Replies next. For this kind of search, returning items ordered by recency seems to be the logic way to go.

Search replies, return replies

Pretty much the same as the last approach, but the results will only contain links to replies. I think someone mentioned phpBB does this, but I’m not sure. This approach seems best suited for a forum where recency has a lot of weight (news, tech, etc).

Search replies, return topics

In this case bbPress will look for the keyword in replies, but return only the parent topics of those matched replies. Of course it’d show each topic only once. Interestingly, here, the results could be ordered by relevance instead of recency (the count of replies in that topic that match the searched keyword). I’m totally biased, because almost all my experience with bbPress is implementing big scale support forums, and for support this approach wins every time.

Regardless of the approach, we should also consider the idea of having an advanced search mode out-of-the-box, where you could, at least, filter on which Forum you want to search. Maybe make it context aware? If I’m in a Forum, it searches within this forum. If I’m at a Topic it searches within it’s replies.

Let’s not forget pages & posts!

The second part of the discussion is harder to solve. How bbPress search should integrate with the standard WordPress search? Here we agreed this seems more like an UX problem than a technical one. Again, a couple of different approaches:

Independent

By far, the easiest to implement. Let’s just have a different search box for bbPress, use a different query_var, keep the bbPress custom post types defined as exclude_from_search and off we go. (Actually, jjj showed us that this is kinda already implemented, at least for topics: example)

Independent but unified

Use the same WordPress search form, but when the users initiate a search from a non bbPress page, run the normal search. If the user searches from inside a bbPress page, run our search. I’ve implemented this in the past and I don’t like it. It’s quite confusing to get different behaviors for the same action.

Integrated

Again, totally biased, but I love how we resolved this here at Modern Tribe (example). I think for some sites it’d be a killer feature the ability to combine results like that. To be honest, I can’t think of a bbPress implementation I’ve done that would not be well served with a search results page like this one. On the other hand, the general consensus was that making something like this look good in any theme would by quite impossible. Specially when you realize we need to take into account custom post types, different ratios of content in each content type, etc.

I’m probably forgetting parts of the discussion, and this is getting long, so I’ll shut up now and make room(?) for you in the comments. What do you think?

As someone who does a pass through The Events Calendar forum each week, and having compared it to the bbPress install we’ve got running to power the forums here on the Modern Tribe website, I came up with a short “wish list” of the features that would help improve the support experience from both an admin and a user perspective:

But, as we grow and our user base does the same, we’ve struggled with setting support expectations on the WordPress.org forum for users who’ve never asked for help before. After some discussion last week, we came up with one solution that would work well for us: a simple text area where plugin devs can enter a “support expectations statement” that appears directly above the first page of forum results on WordPress.org. Here’s how we envision it:

Last night, The Events Calendar received it’s 300,000th download. This was a significant milestone for us at Modern Tribe and finally gave us an opportunity to break out the champagne. But 300,000 users also gave us pause. With this many potential support inquiries, how can we be helpful while setting boundaries? How can we make it clear that while we appreciate and value our core userbase, the bulk of our support resources are routed to paying customers? And how can we draw the line between what we’re really looking for when browsing the dot-org forums — namely, bug reports so we can improve the plugin — and those requests (custom queries, new page templates, etc) that we really only have bandwidth to address when the user has paid for PRO? We feel the support expectations statement proposed above could help with all of these.

For those who aren’t familiar with our support process, we generally break it down like so:

• For free/non-paying users, we hit the WordPress.org support forum for The Events Calendar about once a week. We’re watching for bugs exclusively, but will point users in the right direction if they ask a simple question.
• For PRO/paying users, we monitor the forums here on Modern Tribe’s website daily to ensure nothing goes more than 24-48 hours without a response. Beyond just bugs, we also help with customizations and other more in-depth, time consuming tweaks.