Here is a listing of the areas of functionality covered in BackPress:
* Logging (via bbPress’ logging library) to file/database/other. Supports levels (notice, warn, fatal).
* User Roles management (generally used for access control to portions of your application).
* Schema parser (for comparing schema files to current/live databases).
* User management (including user meta data and DB schema to support it) for managing core user information and arbitrary other user-related data.
* Database Abstraction (including using multiple database servers, clusters and data centers)
* XML-RPC Server and Client operations for interfacing with other systems.
* Mail sending (via SMTP and sendmail, supports attachments)
* Password Hashing/Crypto
* AJAX Responses (standardized XML-based response mechanism for AJAX requests)
* User Authentication using built in crypto for passwords, plus secure cookie management out of the box
* JavaScript and CSS inclusion and dependencies management, including internationalization options for JS strings
* Error handling via objects which can report multiple errors at a time
* Full HTTP library (supporting core PHP HTTP operations, cURL and raw sockets for widest compatibility available. Includes cookie send/receive support)
* Object caching, including using memcached as a backend for semi-persistent storage
* Arbitrary taxonomy management (tagging, categories, other classification systems) with generic DB schema
* Generic options management for handling application-wide options/settings
* Compatibility functions to provide support for useful functionality which is not available in all versions of PHP
* A variety of core helpers for advanced string manipulation, simpler HTTP transactions, security (nonces etc), timezones and more
* Lots of formatting functions for handling strings of all kinds (HTML, typographic features, sanitization, etc)
* KSES: Full security filtering for HTML content
* Complete plugin API, provided via the ability to add “actions” and “filters” to your application and allow any plugin to hook into those places to modify output/perform actions.
* Shortcode API allowing for [bbcode]-style input from a user to be translated using arbitrary rules
* Pseudo-cron functionality, allowing you to fire off events within your application, triggered by visits/page-loads to approximate cron-type functionality