The developers behind the forum software bbPress have announced an official release. The release, bbPress 0.72:Bix, continues with WordPress’ tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians.

The open source software is being developed by the people behind WordPress, led by Matt Mullenweg. I’ve been playing around with bbPress for several months now and I’ve even used it for a couple of forums. It is a great piece of forum software albeit geared towards support forums, what with the checkbox to specify whether a post is a support question or not. It’s blazingly fast and lightweight and comes with search engine friendly urls.

The first official release comes with Akismet spam protection and complete integration with WordPress. I’ve seen posts about WordPress integration a couple of weeks back but I still haven’t tried it.

If you have an active WordPress blog and you’re thinking of putting up a forum then bbPress should be among your first options.