BuddyPress.org

First, the facts.

After reaching a result of ~245k WordPress sites using actively BuddyPress at the end of 2019, the “active installations” statistic (the one which is displayed in the sidebar of our plugin’s page on the official WordPress Plugin Directory), has been decreasing progressively and recently fell just below 200k.

As the Plugin directory uses ranges to simplify the “active installations” statistic, we’re no longer in the 200k+ category but felt into the 100k+ one.

-19%

That’s the BuddyPress usage negative growth between the end of 2019 and today.

Meaning?

In short, some users don’t use community features on their WordPress site anymore or, more likely, fewer and fewer users are using BuddyPress to power their community site.

While such negative growth can lead to bankruptcy when you’re running a business, it does not mean maintaining our plugin is under immediate threat. You can count on the BuddyPress core team’s passion to carry on working on fixing bugs and improving features.

Let’s come together and reverse the trend!

Confronted by extraordinary difficulty, people from a family, a tribe, a team, a community, a company, a country, a continent, earth, temporarily forget about their individual need or personal feelings and unite together to find the best way to deal with this difficulty. This is happening because we know that if everyone focuses on a general benefit, we’ll have a better chance of achieving that benefit than if each of us tries to satisfy our own goals.

I believe the English quote for this idea is “In unity there is strength“.

More than ever, BuddyPress needs you to contribute to beta testing, support, documentation, translations and, of course, code.

As a start, we’d love to hear your voice about this simple question:

In your opinion, what is the most important thing that BuddyPress is missing?

Please, tell us about it by replying to this forum topic. Feel free to talk about every aspect of the project and to suggest ways to do better. If you could then take an extra step and share the link of this post or this topic with your friends, that would be awesome. Thanks in advance for your help 😍.

We (the BuddyPress software & community) are 14 years old. We were the first plugin to extend WordPress with community features, giving users a free and open source alternative to commercial “Social Media” (social network companies whose end goal is to sell advertisements based on your data). 

With WordPress and BuddyPress: you keep the freedom to share, data ownership and the control of every aspect of your community site. The BuddyPress core team is committed to preserving this free and totally open source tool for anyone.