BuddyPress.org

1.1.x (whatever it was) was great. I had an activity stream widget on the front page, so I could immediately see (well, once I’d deleted all the spam registrations) who’d been doing what and where, and I click to go and view the context and respond in the same place.

Now I get the feeling that BuddyPress is a platform for creating communities of BuddyPress users

Now there is no profile wire (I renamed it to ‘wall’ because nobody understood what a ‘wire’ is) – it was an absolutely fantastic way for me to greet new users and have a bit of open chat with them.

Now there is this @username nonsense which I don’t understand myself (I am not and never will be a twitter user) – where does that post go? It shows up as if it’s my (Facebook-style) status update. Someone can reply to it but I can’t reply to their reply. All continuity has been lost. I can see the advantage of AJAX replies in the activity stream, but not when it seems a random factor whether the post will appear only in the stream or whether it will appear at source..

The default theme is awful (1.1.x or whatever I had was beautiful, right out of the box) – It took me forever just to get the home page working with two widget columns (surely that wouldn’t have been hard to include in the release..?) but the profile page… ooooh no, it’s a disaster In 1.1.x I had no problems tweaking the profile page to make it do what I want… with 1.2 it defaults to the awful activity stream and I have to click through to profile on every user to see if he comes from xgGT54GRerju and works at Ox8iHghuf34 before I delete him as a spammer.

I started using BP because I needed to replace an ancient platform that I’d written myself ages ago, and I wanted something reliable and extensible because I just don’t have the free time to work on my site anymore. BP 1.1.x was exactly what I wanted (I tried Elgg and some other yucky, heaving nonsense before stumbling on the beautiful BP).

But now it’s just gone off on an utterly bizarre tangent and lost all its intuitive user- (and admin-)friendliness

I know it’s free and I know I’m moaning and not being productive but I really can’t write plugins or themes for BP (much as I would love to – I can’t even work out how to put the wire back) but I feel it’s very sad to see something so good (and so free) go so wrong