BuddyPress

Part of my routine each morning is to go through and check the wp and bp trac to see what changes have been made that I need to be aware of. With wp 3.0, this has become very important for me, and has actually taught me a lot about wp. It also helps to know when major changes are made between beta’s and rc’s that will affect what I am building. (I hope to one day get my coding ability to the point where I can actually contribute instead of just leaching)

I’ve just noticed over the past number of weeks that there is really no activity going on with the bp trac. Yeah, there are a few minor changesets, but that’s about it. It seems to me that Andy has completely fallen off the planet. None of us in the regular community have heard anything from him in what seems forever. Even the bpdev site is very quiet, and I didn’t see much of anything mentioned for the dev chats. (I wish I could attend, but for me at least, they fall at the worst possible time each week)

This thread is in no way meant to be a rant, and I don’t want it to go that direction. I’m simply asking if bp is pretty much being abandoned by automatic. At the very least, after watching the furious action over the past few months on wp 3.0 in the trac, it has become very apparent that bp does not carry anywhere near the weight with automatic. Of course that is to be expected. It’s just after watching so many video’s of Matt talking about bp, one would think that automatic would at least assign some resources to bp.

Am I way off base with this observation?

Things have slowed up (trac-wise) and I have noticed less activity on the boards (from Andy too) but it is hard to assume what happens within a company and allocation of resources.

I think you are… but it is totally OK to be concerned when our websites and communities rely on wp and bp working together. Everyone who’s involved in similar projects, like this one is, know that it can be quite tricky to dedicate all of his time to development and that there are ups and downs when it comes to enthusiasm. So no worries, I don’t think that bp is slowly dying.

I’m afraid I too have noticed this decline in activity from when I first started frequenting buddypress.org and it’s Trac last november-ish when it was to a degree a hive of activity and one did see the three core developers drop in on a fairly regular basis, they are now extremely noticeable in their absence. It’s a little worrying as The community aspect of open source projects is often held aloft like a torch but that torch needs to be kept burning (rubbish metaphor )

It’s always awkward when a company such as Automattic backs something like BP as many might see that as a seal of approval and a reassurance that the project will be kept firmly on track and supported (I certainly did and it helped cement our decision to go with BP) at the moment it does feel as though things are on the back burner when – with the imminent release of stable WP 3.0 – BP appears to be far from release of 1.3 judging by the backlog of Tickets to be resolved.

I would really love to hear from the core dev team or even Automattic that BP is being kept on course and not sidelined for the moment while Automattic allocate resources elsewhere?

And no this is not a rant either just a fair degree of concern

@rainman I think one of the concerns is that BP is – too an extent – not to be considered a hobby project , it’s backed by Automattic and they employ Andy, and as far as I’m aware – not that I know one way or another – to work on developing BP; however I’m sure he help out in general where needed on Automattic’s development projects?

I noticed a lot of projects slowing down & waiting on a stable release of WP3.0, with that about to happen I’m sure dev will pick up here again.
I wouldn’t worry about BP just yet…

Yep trouble is projects can’t just halt waiting on something else, WP 3.0 from beta 1 has appeared remarkably stable and each subsequent release has too, stable enough to base development on I would have thought, but you have a point it is, I guess, safer to know ones developing to a final stable release.

I think it seems people are waiting for the next stable releases as well… Don’t give up on BP! ever! It rocks! Thank you all, if I could code I would… but as a newbie with bp, the potential for this far is beyond anything else out there for sure.

Yes indeed we may have seen a bit of slowing down recently, but IMHO: WP3 will be out this week and devs are really waiting for this final release. @johnjamesjacoby has worked on the 1.2 branch in the past few days and the trac says BP 1.2.5 is due in a couple of weeks, hopefully bringing even more compatibility with WP3 for the BP 1.2 branch. Then I think they will need to merge that with the trunk, where a lot of work is already done in terms of 1.3 roadmapped features. And what about the wonderful plugins coming within a couple of months from GSOC projects? And what about all the other plugin devs, constantly bringing us extraordinary new features for BP? Future seems bright to me!

@luccame that’s the spirit!

This is an interesting topic… If i had to answer the topic I would say YES! Since it’s very inception BP has continually shed plugin and theme developers. With all do respect to Andy, the software development has continually managed to break many useful plugins and themes forcing people to either stay or go with the project. I think it has been demoralizing for many developers and adopters like myself to worry about the “break” factor when upgrading. I know I am still using 1.1.3 and will most likely be there for a while if not permanently because there are just no good substitutes for many of the plugins I use. It’s good to be positive but at this point there has to be a good hard evaluation of the project and it’s progress.

Buddypress has become an extension of BBpress.

I just assume that they are more focused on making BP compliant with WP 3.0 so that there isn’t a meltdown when 3.0 is released, and afterwards turn their attention back to the community and improving Buddypress further. I am pretty upset by the lack of presence and response on the forum. I don’t stress over following the trac day to day, and I don’t live on the bleeding edge, but when you contact someone directly it is important to get a response and some direction, everybody has something riding on this.

BuddyPress really seems to be slowing down when following its TRAC and I have followed it for more than a year now. The only thing I am seeing are Andys updates on his Twitter-page talking about soccer and his iPad. For my understanding, this is an indication that BP is (slowly) dying.

There are only a few major features which need to be developed in the BP-Core-Code in order to make BuddyPress a proper Social-Networking-software:
- Privacy features
- Properly working Private-Groups (I do have a TRAC-ticket out there regarding this)
- Blog-Posts from the Front-End

And most of all: BuddyPress needs to be made much simpler in terms of User-Interface (Navigation & Activity-streams).
Less is More !

KISS (Keep It Simple & Stupid)

No need to panic, everything is fine. JJJ is working hard on 1.2.5 and I’m still working towards 1.3 at a slower pace as my time is split in a few areas. I’m talking about soccer on Twitter because the world cup is on, and there’s more to life than code.