Just received notice that bbPress 1.0 alpha 2 has been released to the general public for download. The next installation in the bbPress alpha series introduces new features and fixes most of the issues raised by testers from the previous release.

A lot of the features were covered in a previous post. You can view the changes in bbPress between 1.0-alpha-1 and 1.0-alpha-2, as well as the changes that have been made to BackPress between revision 109 and 161.

The XML-RPC functionality now built into bbPress 1.0 alpha has made possible a new plugin for WordPress called “bbPress Live“.

bbPress Live allows the display of information from a bbPress 1.0 forum from inside a WordPress blog.

Specifically, it provides two new widgets:

• bbPress Forum List – Provides a list or table of forums
• bbPress Latest Topics – Provides a list or table of the latest topics

Each widget can be used multiple times, and configured individually.

There are also two functions for use in themes. These functions return a raw php array which can be manipulated inside the theme:

• bbpress_live_get_forums() – Provides an array of forums
• bbpress_live_get_topics() – Provides an array of the latest topics

bbPress Live can only connect to a bbPress forum running bbPress with a version of 1.0 or higher. The bbPress blog must have XML-RPC enabled in it’s settings.

**Update: if you can’t download bbPress 1.0 Alpha 2 from the regular download site you can get it here http://trac.bbpress.org/browser/tags/1.0-alpha-2.