[Erwin Gerrits]

Hi folks,

There has been much speculation about the future of bp-events. There have also been questions as to the seriousness of my involvement with it.

I am witing this to set the record straight.

bp-events for BP 1.2 will come out when it comes out. Simple as that. I have no time line. I am not a professional programmer. I am writing bp-events, with the help of some other people, in my spare time. It is unreasonable to expect that bp-events 1.2 will come out a week after BP 1.2 comes out (I even had questions about it BEFORE BP 1.2 came out). As many of you know, it takes a lot of time to write a plug-in. Especially for an ever evolving platform like BP, with sparse, if any, documentation. It is a lot of trial and error.

Being an amateur programmer, I have, say, two hours a week to write this stuff. I work in my own company 50 hours a week (not programming related), and then I have a family, a house to keep up, kids, other hobbies, etc. Much like many of you.

What seems to be forgotten, is that many plugin writers do this stuff for a living, and have many more hours a week to devote to it and as such, plugins get updated a lot faster.

Anyway, this is not to complain/whine, just to let you know where I’m coming from.

In short, I don’t owe anyone anything. I am writing bp-events as a hobby and you’re getting bp-events for FREE.

Again, it is very simple: if you don’t like my time-line you’re free to look elsewhere or even write your own. It’s a free world.

[gpo1]

We all respect that and job well done…

[Hugo Ashmore]

Utterly respect what you are saying Erwin, sad though that you feel you have to state this so emphatically.

From my personal and selfish perspective coming to BP from Ning one of the things I was asked to replicate was an events page similar to that which our small community had enjoyed and used, naturally after hunting around came across your plugin and was happy to find it then a little sad to find that the mapping functionality was not working due to a BP upgrade and your lack of time to fix this aspect; no matter i thought it will be sorted eventually and the rest of the plugin behaved perfectly and we needed it so I proceeded with implementing and styling to our requirements, at this point it’s worth noting the, and this has been raised elsewhere, notion of the Canonical plugin, we have been surprised at the lack of what many would consider core Social Networking features in BP by this I mean aspects such as Links. Events, and general Media capabilities, all things evident in the other big players in this arena. Events was a plugin that I felt and still feel ought to be part of the core and NOT a plugin along with BP-Album and the Links plugin.

Events was further broken ireprably by of all things our upgrade to WPMU 2.9.1 at which point I had to remove it altogether, this didn’t look good and I was asked questions for which I had to try and reassure people that Events would reappear when we did the next phased upgrade of the community to BP 1.2.

The above is in no way intended to attempt to make you feel guilty whatsoever I honestly sympathize with your situation, What it is intended to try and illustrate is how vital certain plugins and the functionality they add are, we can come to rely on them yet find that there is no real support for them or that the author simply doesn’t have time to continually work on keeping them up to date; of course the response can often be that we are free to take on the plugin ourselves after all this is all open source stuff!! But like yourself I have precious little time, I cannot sit all day playing with plugin code, code that at this stage I am not up to speed with, all the free development time I have is devoted to trying to get a working theme ready so we can upgrade to BP 1.2 most of my time in reality is spent keeping the core of our small web development company running.

So what to do? Plugins are both at once a strength and a weakness to projects such as this, strange as this may sound.

Your plugin was great and I only hope that perhaps someone with more time on their hands can take up the running with this and more importantly that maybe the core developers can maybe look at what constitutes the real core offering of a Social Network App in terms of features and make plans to bring in the work you have done to date and make it a solid part of the core rather than a plugin.

Whatever happens be assured that I think most of us with any development experience and / or too little time to get anything done appreciate your feelings and frustrations at the pressure brought to bear

[Hugo Ashmore]

In fairness I guess that this post on this thread wasn’t too helpful and got a lot of hopes up especially given the implied timelines and nearness of completion:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/most-effective-events-plugin

Great News! Heard back from Erwin re bp-events and he authorized me to post an update (quoted)

I am working with Dave Aubin to make bp-events work with 1.2,

including the new templates. That is just days away (I hope), then

I turn the code over to Sven who has been working on integrating the

excellent jQuery plugin FullCalendar (and has the code ready to go)

once I hand over the bp-events 1.2 code.

I tell you, working with the new template system without any

documentation has been quite the chore as I am sure you know as well.

Once that is all working I will release a preliminary version

and work on some additional features/widgets.

So, I hope bp-events 1.2 comes out within a month of the

official bp 1.2 came out, so in all, not too bad!

BP 1.2 was released on Feb 16th so I think it’s safe to ball-park a working copy around mid march, by his estimation. Suffice to say I am fired up.

[bobin1983]

I agree with @hnla – welcome to open source development @erwin!

Nobody’s trying to get you to do something you don’t want to do – it’s a matter of respect, waiting for you to clarify whether you are continuing work on the plugin.

It’s useful to know where you stand with it, as now we can branch off for waiting for your release and develop the plugin / create a new plugin our self.

[peterverkooijen]

Totally agree Erwin Gerrits.

This is why I get annoyed with plugin/feature wishlist posts, when there are still so many core BP issues that need to be fixed or cleaned up. Plugin development takes time. Time is money. If you need a feature these are the options:

– get a paid commercial plugin, so you can hold the company responsible for bugs and updates

– get a proven, best-of-breed WP plugin that has a broad users/developers base of its own and that you can perhaps adapt a bit to take advantage of BP

– get a BP plugin that someone developed for his own project, with little guarantees that it will be updated or work within your theme or do everything you need

– write your own

[Mariusooms]

This is where Drupal open source community shines. Developers can submit code or bug fixes to the project eventhough they are not part of the team. The lead developer, can then at their own leisure decide what to do with this. Sure we have trac and all that, but Drupal does this a whole lot better. This in turn makes it much easier for lead developers and encourages people to help with the project.

I realize this is not a helpful piece of information at all actually I just wish we could work together better and more effectively as co-developers.

Thanks for sharing Erwin, I totally understand. Honestly, I log to many hours and should keep a better balance. I’m glad you are able to do that. We all look forward to your continued involvement and we value it a lot. Especially since you are not a professional programmer! So be encouraged, sorry I can’t be involved more since bp 1.1.

[Peter Anselmo]

@Mariusooms,

Although there’s not an interface for it, if you know how to use subversion, you can submit enhancements or fixes for anything on the WordPress repository (prettymuch everything around here). All plugins can be checked out from the repository by anyone, then you can make changes, submit your changes to the maintainer. Check out this link:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Subversion#Saving_patch.2Fdiff_files

[Mike Pratt]

Thanks for reminding us @Peter. I realize the lesson you want to preach is ‘quit relying on people’ when the service is provided for free. People were just asking for clarification so they could make informed decisions. To be a part of a community is to have that collective responsibility. That’s what this is about, not whether people are owed anything from Erwin.

[Derek]

Erwin it’s all good man! I think it’s a testament to the quality of your work that your plugin is so widely used. I will say again this feature is essential component of a community site and if we all depended on this feature perhaps adding it to BuddyPress core should be discussed at some point. Me personally I think it’s more important the a photo album. Just my 2 cents

[David Lewis]

In fairness… I don’t think anyone ever said they felt they were owed anything. People just wanna know what the deal is. That’s fair enough. That said… I don’t know what kind of emails Erwin has been getting.

For my part… I’ve done exactly as suggested. I gave up on bp-events a long time ago. I have a site that has to launch, so I went with an alternate solution. It’s not nearly as good as bp-events… but it’ll do for now until something better comes along. I’m not a programmer so forking or coding my own is not an option. And the website is for a volunteer organization I’m involved with so hiring someone is also not an option.

[David Lewis]

A number of people have asked me what my alternate solution is… it’s just a WordPress events plugin. There are lots of them. There’s no BuddyPress integration. It’s not ideal… but it will do for now. Specifically, I chose this plugin: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/calendar/

[LwEEs]

Grow up!

[Bowe]

Not to be rude or anything, but should we (the community) see if we can find another developer for this? I’m willing to donate to get this going, and with so much working already done by Erwin (thank you for that!) shouldnt we try and get a developer on board.

I can’t really tell if you have a problem with this Erwin, and if your remark “your free to do whatever you like” is actually serious or more meant as a defense to people complaining about wanting to get the plugin RIGHT NOW FFS (lol?).

If you look at the amount of progress the two BP-Album+ guys made in two weeks I’m sure BP-Events could kick some serious butt with an extra developer.. I think this is a core feature which should be out sooner then later. I’ll ask the developers I speak regularly (all three of them) if they are interested in this, because it’s kind of a waste to let this lay around for months.. agreed?

[3sixty]

There are many people who would gladly donate time and money to help Erwin with this. Not sure if you saw this, but Andy is about to make this much easier:

Andy Peatling (6 days ago): I’m working on a new version of this site that will automatically create a group for every new BuddyPress plugin that appears in the repo. This means plugins will get all the functionality of BP groups – a forum, activity stream, a list of members who are interested in the plugin, etc etc. I’m also going to add a donate page, which should help out a bit.

This has been held up a little right now because I’m trying to get the new upgrade/install wizard done first. This will allow BP to use WordPress pages instead of hacking with root components. It’s all bits of the jigsaw that need to be put in place before I can continue. Hopefully by the end of the month I should have at least the first iteration of the site close to completion.

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/supporting-devs-wishlist#post-43329

Ultimately, this is Erwin’s baby, so he’s free to develop this at his own pace and according to his own specifications.

[designodyssey]

This is the challenge with open source and most plugins. This is also why many people choose not to release the plugins they write. Most people totally appreciate the hard work, the lack of compensation and the endless “how do I’s?”

But invariably, there’s some impatient someone who thinks the developers world should revolve around their needs (whether they’re willing to pay or not) and that spoils it for everyone.

I do think it courteous that those who release plugins let us know their plans. They don’t owe us, but I think it’s courteous. Of course, plans change and given that free plugins are not often the priority, plans will change often. The sooner most realize that, probably the more plugins they’ll write themselves and the more people will be willing to release what they’ve already written.

I’m glad Andy and crew are getting paid now, but this all started as a free donation and I am extremely appreciative of that. Every bit of code here is testament to the extreme generosity of this community in a “me-first” world.

[Andrew Fielden]

I first of all want to say that I support Erwin all the way in what he is saying as I know that the effort involved in getting a piece of decent code out there is huge and doing it all for free is a big ask. This is especially so when such code could quite happily be used in commercial organisations who most definitely will charge for the services that they provide.

It seems to me that the eco-system surrounding a product like WP/BP is one that we are still coming to grips with but in essence it seems that there is a move to basic functionality/service for free and that additional usage/features will attract a fee. According to the Mashable review of the recent talk by WP Founder Matt Mullenweg this is how Automattic supports its operations.

So why should a plugin developer not expect the same? Perhaps the future of such development should be along the lines of groups of coders providing a freemium type service so that there is a basic level of functionality and you pay for the extras.

[David Lewis]

The issue is simple… bp-events is essentially the only option and there’s been a lack of communication from Erwin. So now we know. Good. Time to move on. I can now tell my organization that we have a plan going forward and that we can finally launch our site. We’ll just have to use a regular WordPress calendar instead of bp-events. Not ideal but it’s the best we can do. I’m fine with whatever… as long as I have a plan.

[roydeanjr]

I agree, lack of communication has been the biggest problem.

Now we have a word from Erwin.

Interestingly, he did not respond to anyone. Lack of communication.

I am interested to know who the other developers are and whether we have permission from Erwin to continue this work, i.e. do the things he has not time for, etc.

The more people that contribute, the less time each individual will have to give away. Spread the load, let us help or give us permission to take over.

[roydeanjr]

I agree, lack of communication has been the biggest problem.

Now we have a word from Erwin.

Interestingly, he did not respond to anyone. Lack of communication.

I am interested to know who the other developers are and whether we have permission from Erwin to continue this work, i.e. do the things he has not time for, etc.

The more people that contribute, the less time each individual will have to give away. Spread the load, let us help or give us permission to take over.

[Mike Pratt]

bp-events is open for us to do what-ever we want with it. Now…who has time?

[stwc]

Permission isn’t necessary to fork the code, as I understand these things, though I guess maybe it would be the polite thing to do. If I recall the history of this plugin, Erwin took it over from someone else a long time back, I think.

Like Mike said, it’s down to who has time, if they don’t want to wait for Erwin.

[warut]

as erwin said, I also develop plugin for a hobbie not a work for living so can’t commit that plugin can update rapidly but I understand who waiting for use some good plugin too. I also waiting to use bp-event too after use it in bp 1.1 and it work very well so i hope to see that if erwin have a time he can lead to make others coorperate to develop the code.

grad to hear that andy will make a group for every plugin that everyone interest in the plugin can make suggestion or help to developer. i think if website had good infrasturction to let others help to develop plugin it will make buddypress grow faster.

[stwc]

Hear hear to that last. I understand that developing Buddypress itself does and should take the bulk of Andy and JJJ (and ?)’s time, but I reckon buddypress.org could also use a useability refresh…

[Derek]

Hello I just thought this one deserved a bump… Any news on this?

[Ekine]

This guy milordk (https://wordpress.org/support/profile/1487174) updated the events plugin (http://milordk.ru/r-lichnoe/opyt-l/cms/bp-events-dlya-buddypress-1-2-x.html) for buddypress 1.2 It would be cool if developers would join forces and if necessary be willing to accept donations for an awesome events plugin with possibly an iphone version using geoloaction.