For those who haven't heard about TalkPress it is one of the latest offerings from Automattic. Running on bbPress, it is Automattic's hosted forum solution. Think of it this way, TalkPress is to forums what WordPress.com is to blogs.
I first heard of TalkPress about a year ago but information since has been a little scarce except for the odd tidbit here and there. So imagine my surprise when I read it was actually live. I wonder why there was no official announcement? No fanfare? I haven't seen it mentioned in any of the official WordPress blogs. I only found out about it while going through my WordPress related Google news alerts and noticed a post by resident bbPress guru _ck_. Evidently _ck_ was equally surprised... which surprised me even more.
There's not much to see on the TalkPress home page. It actually looks more like a holding or landing page. Perhaps it is still in beta and hasn't been officially released yet? Maybe they are catering only to certain clientele during the testing phase? I don't know.
Has anyone else heard about this?
Update O9 April 09 - More information has been released in this post from the bbPress blog.
About Len Kutchma
Is it free?
Hi Bart,
I don't think it is even open to the public yet let alone free.
TalkPress VIP is basically the same sort of hosted setup as WordPress VIP. So you are correct, TalkPress VIP is not free.
If you check out the current development trunk of bbPress you'll get an idea of what to expect...there are a ton of changes from the latest release.
You'd need to talk with Automattic regarding any specifics in other areas, but I can tell you that the underlying setup is indeed in place and running.
Thanks for that update Brian.
With respect to the current development version of bbPress I have several local installs updated via SVN so I know what you're talking about.
The forum you linked to Ask the Natural Living Experts looks quite spiffy. Well done.
No problem at all and I'm glad to hear others are curious about TalkPress. And thanks for the compliment as well! A lot of work by a lot of people went into getting this completed and I'm quite pleased with how everything turned out.
Looking forward to its release.
So am I although at this point in time I have no use for a forum.
Did you catch the post about it? http://bbpress.org/blog/2009/04/talkpress-and-bbpress/
Hi Brian.
Yes I read that and added an update to my original post yesterday. It answers my questions. Thanks for stopping by and passing that info on.