It’s here, the WordPress of forum software! I’m happy to report that bbPress 1.0 is out, featuring a user friendly interface and a lot of the things we’d expect from something this closely related to WordPress. This from the announcement post:
This release offers many usability improvements, based on making bbPress more approachable for adopters who are accustomed to WordPress. To that end bbPress 1.0 now has a similar administration interface to WordPress and uses similar descriptions and names where appropriate. bbPress also behaves more like WordPress when it comes to things like automatically generating your .htaccess file when setting up permalinks.
BbPress has been stable for quite some time, actually, but in desperate need of polishing for most users. The 1.0 release is said to bring that, along with great support for integration with WordPress 2.7 and 2.8. Naturally, you can download it from bbpress.org.