Help Shape the Future of BuddyPress
May 16, 2009 in Community
Since the release of BuddyPress 1.0 we’ve been thinking of interesting ways that the community could directly participate in the roadmap for future BuddyPress releases.
We think we’ve found a fun approach, and so we’ve decided to run a bit of an experiment. Over the last week, those who participate in the BuddyPress IRC room on Freenode have had the chance to look over and comment on a list of new BuddyPress features. These features are what we’d like to see make their way into BuddyPress within the next 1-3 versions.
Here’s where you, as a community member come in. We’d like you to play a part in ranking these features, placing the most important features (to you) at the top, and the less important ones at the bottom. Hopefully we can tally enough votes to get a fairly decent overall perspective on what people want first.
These are just features for existing components, the two new components – status updates and albums are already at the top of the roadmap.
I’ve built an interface over the last couple of days that will allow any BuddyPress.org member to log in and start “Roadmap Ranking”. Each of the features are broken down into their respective component and only one component is displayed on the screen at a time. You should rank each component’s features separately. Just drag and drop features in the list.
Head on over to the roadmap ranking page, and cast your vote!
Jtbailey said on May 16, 2009
the drag and drop voting is cool, but the features seem kinda uninspired.
I didn’t know you were going over new features in the IRC, I’d have thrown my 2 cents in.
Nicola Greco said on May 16, 2009
Too cool, i love democracy
Luccame said on May 16, 2009
I love this buddypress thing.
Good work!
wpmubp.org said on May 16, 2009
Could you list the options? I’d like to review the options, but once submitted I can’t see it anymore (of course, but).
Dimensionmedia said on May 16, 2009
Great idea, Andy. Glad to hear photo albums are still on the ‘to-do’ (got scared there for a minute).
Harouni said on May 16, 2009
Cool, I’m off to vote now
Ezd said on May 16, 2009
Great! Just voted.
Casperize said on May 16, 2009
The opportunity to contribute is much appreciated. Thank you.
Bradgarland said on May 16, 2009
Couple things.
1) Really great idea on using that way of getting community feedback.
2) The voting AJAX ‘plugin?’ that your using…is that available as an actual plugin and if so, where?
Thanks for letting us help decide!
Andy Peatling said on May 16, 2009
Bradgarland:
It’s a custom plugin I’ve built, but I could package it up and release it. I’ll see about doing that.
abcde666 said on May 16, 2009
I already voted and I was happy to see that the “threaded forum” and “inline posts” is on the voting-list.
The “Voting AJAX-plugin” would be a nice thing to have within each “Group” of BuddyPress, like doing polls for each group…..
overall, great stuff Andy !
Many thanks,
Erich
Nicola Greco said on May 16, 2009
Pooldaddy next time
Roy McKenzie said on May 17, 2009
Awesome! Got my votes in! Yay! Looking forward to continued development!
ikogsakanding said on May 17, 2009
wow… great… looking forward also…. great great great….
Donvaldez3 said on May 17, 2009
Thank You!
Lookfab said on May 18, 2009
I just did something dumb, and it seemed like something others might also do. I paged through the list to get a sense of all the features under consideration, and only realized after the last one that it was accepting the default order as my preferences.
If I’m not the only idiot then the results might lean towards the default order.
Thebigk said on May 18, 2009
This is really cool!
I wish there was a profile field that let us do “add more record” type functionality. For example a field that would let us keep job history.
Walter24 said on May 18, 2009
Neat Neat Neat. I am glad to know the Privacy feature and the Photo Gallery are at the top. Thank You!
Kunal17 said on May 18, 2009
Thanks for involving the community like this. Waiting to see the results and especially an ETA on some of the items on the list.
Alunsina said on May 19, 2009
widgetize everything! that is sooo cool.
looking forward for the release of the voting plugin!
Danandjenn said on May 19, 2009
Hi Andy!
wow, great stuff.. awesome to see how far BuddyPress has come.
OK, my feedback is a little contrarian, please don’t take it in a negative way at all.
The short version is that looking over these proposed features, none of them is a major enhancement to take BuddyPress those few extra steps to being the plug-it-in social network that SO MANY of us need deseperately.
For example, our main website Ask Dan and Jennifer – is a very popular dating, love, and sex advice column and resource site.
in our attempt to add a real community around the site, last year we installed a vBulletin forum so our members could talk to one another, get help from one another, etc.
it’s been hugely successful (for a forum anyway), but forums are so limited as far as a social network goes. they’re the tip of the iceberg and the vBulletin inc. guys are working to hard to perfect their “horse carriage”, not realizing that what people expect today is a real social network, with a forum being a component, not the core of it.
WordPress MU + BuddyPress + BBPress is SO CLOSE to a true plug-in social network. and every strong content site needs one desperately.
Anyway, here’s what I see as some “low hanging fruit” to get BuddyPress those few extra steps so it’s a ready to go social network for sites like ours:
1. Millions of people have accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Integrate new account creating so it works flawlessly with both of these, and also Google Accounts. I see someone made a quick add-on script, so you have a great starting point, it’s not “from scratch”.
There’s a system called RPX actually that i think brings these all in together for you – check out RPX single-sign-on here.
This is so hugely important (and fairly easy to implement i imagine comparatively speaking) because it will boost sign-ups for all of us with sites. people don’t want to make yet ANOTHER account… but they’ll “login with facebook” or “login with twitter” or “login with their google account”. increasing registrations by making it braindead simple is awesome.
2. import / migration tools… we have 4000 users in vBulletin, theyd’ need to be imported into bbPress / BuddyPress with full profile info.
For vBulletin we’d also need to keep our full slugs and url structure for our posts that have all been search engine ranked over time… the comments don’t matter maybe, but the threads that have been search engine ranked are very important.
3. Allow people to plug in their facebook or Twitter activity stream (both are available) and pull those in to populate their wire or their wall, that way they don’t have to duplicate their status. after all their friends want to know what they’re doing, no matter where they may be doing it .
Email me with any questions, and again please take this in the best possible way – I absolutely cannot wait for these items above to be done so we can move from vBulletin immediately!
Thanks guys!!!
Dan (Ask Dan & Jennifer)
IT Buzz said on May 19, 2009
Yeah that’s true buddypress is really a cool tool but there’s still some pitfalls like very limited number of themes/templates available.
Mark Leonard said on May 19, 2009
Just Brilliant!
You got my my votes.
Drivencompassion said on May 19, 2009
OpenStack FTW!
Traukainehm said on May 20, 2009
A while ago the idea of a buddypress for “normal” wordpress installation popped up. kinda liked the distributed social network thingy.
Jeeves said on May 20, 2009
well accidentally pressed the last button without realizing it was submit button. duh! feel like peter griffin at the moment. can i vote again? let me try
Jeeves said on May 20, 2009
can’t even see the options now. poor me.
Amhyaut said on May 25, 2009
Just tried to vote and see and wondering why there’s no privacy features for extended profile in next version ?
Like, if there’s extra field like Contact Information and user want to make only visible for their friends.
If buddy press will do very nice privacy features in next future version, it will be very nice. Thanks.
Danandjenn said on May 26, 2009
Hi Andy,
Would still love to hear your thoughts on what I said above.
Thanks!
Dan
Andy Peatling said on May 26, 2009
@Danandjenn Thanks for the feedback. There is actually already a Facebook connect service for BuddyPress so that users can log in with their Facebook details. You’ll find it in the WordPress plugin repo.
Most of the integration and sharing of data you talk about is covered by something called the “Open Stack” and is on the list. This will enable sharing of activity stream items, contact, profile data etc.
Import and exporting of data is also on the list.
PB said on May 27, 2009
OpenStack FTW!
Peterverkooijen said on May 27, 2009
Buddypress is great, it does almost everything I need.
One major problem area is registration. It is currently aimed at the typical web teen/tween, starting with the anonymous ‘username’ and the use of the word User (‘Dear User’) in confirmation emails, which are horribly written overall.
I have to modify the registration process into something that could support a more grown-up members database, so on registration I would need full name, with separate fields for first and last, and several additional profile fields for location, company, job title, etc.
Registration should be as simple as possible. Initially all that is needed is a full name (first + last separate…) + email address. The rest could be moved to a second optional profile fields page after activation.
This excellent plugin make login with email address possible and eliminates the need to have a stupid ‘username’.
But removing the username field from registration requires lots of ugly hacking.
Managing optional profile fields requires lots of ugly hacking.
Getting a real full name in two separate fields for first and last requires lots of ugly hacking.
Editing the activation/welcome email texts requires lots of ugly hacking.
To me these are all essential elements. If customizing the registration process, including email texts, was a little more flexible, Buddypress could dramatically broaden its possible use cases.
And if anyone can help me hacking temporary solutions, please contact me…
Jacarma said on May 28, 2009
A digg-like page, with the most voted (and recent) blog entries won’t be available before the version 4.0?
Ishimwe said on May 30, 2009
Buddypress is great especially that it’s based on wordpress which is the most widely used publishing platform.
Buddypress ups: Too many.
Buddypress downs: 1) No photo gallery plugin with the first release. Are you kidding? It is intended for social. I would love to see future releases packed with image, video, . . . plugins, even if these were in the most basic form.
2) The invite friends importer so far has been a nightmare for me. So, if you guys could work on improving that, it’d be great!
Doug Daulton said on June 2, 2009
I am very interested in creating a migration tool for moving to BP from Ning. I think this tool also creates a very natural growth opportunity for BP. I would like to start e Dev Group to explore this plugin, but Groups are currently disabled.
Andy Peatling said on June 2, 2009
@doug.daulton: Groups will be enabled on this site soon, we are currently running some upgrades to make this feature available. For now, please feel free to start a thread on the forums.
IT Buzz said on June 2, 2009
I’m just loving its too ccol. I had been using other social networking web architecture but buddypress is really easy to install and work with thanks to buddypress development team they had really done a superb job.
Shalva.sultanishvili said on June 3, 2009
@Andy Peatling
I have also submitted my opinion but I think there were features discussed that are not so much actual as some others.
When we think about development of new social network we must understand that no meter what will be released it must be much more better than existed on the market.
I look and found that BP looks nice but there are missing features that are important for the beginning like: Photo Album, Voting for members showing their popularity or voting their pictures, Invite Friends and members from other accounts like GMAL, FACEBOOK and etc. This is all necessary.
At the same time I have one more question. How important is to have a lot of tools as plug-ins when you can include them in final product from the beginning if user do not need this tool he can simply disable it.
Ronia said on June 5, 2009
For the future of Buddypress : ( some of these may have been already said or are in the front-burner)
================================
For the super site admin
=================
One click (well … may take a few clicks) web installer package for BP
Ability to determine what shows up or is promoted to front page, for example, only promoted blog posts show up in the recent Blogs block
Categories for groups
Easy language changer, good unicode support
For the member-user
=================
Inbuilt email- importer that lets user (optionally) to invite others at the time of registering
Easy ajax profile comments ( see Orkut) and 1:1 Wall
Tags for everything – profile, group, everything
Photo annotations ( mark or spot-write) on album photos
Forums, Events, and Polls inbuilt for Groups
Social Apps or Gadgets ( all actual social network have this )
peppobk said on August 27, 2009
Any examples of website integrating Facebook Connect with Buddypress?
thanks
ange niyikiza said on March 28, 2010
I need help, I am willing to pay to have my cropping avatar working. I am using buddy press.
If any body wants to help please e-mail me at slimxslim@yahoo.com