Forum Replies Created
-
Thank you!
– You cannot run BuddyBoss Platform and BP at the same time. BuddyBoss is a fork of BuddyPress and shares a lot of the same underlying code, so they cannot run at the same time.
– These are the themes available: https://www.buddyboss.com/themes/
“BuddyBoss Theme” is for BuddyBoss Platform.
Boss 2.0 and OneSocial are actually for BuddyPress.I know it’s a bit confusing, but long term our product stack is basically just BuddyBoss Platform and BuddyBoss Theme which is actually very simple. We’re not making any new BuddyPress themes. The goal is to have everything you need out of the box from us with one plugin, one theme. That way we can focus all of our efforts on updating that product stack and just make it really awesome. We are adding more options over time to make the theme really flexible with layouts, especially via Elementor, so that people can take that one theme and make it look like anything.
@techhnyne
BuddyBoss Platform (our version of BuddyPress) is free, including updates. The platform includes all of the social functionality, while the theme is purely for layout and is optional. You do pay for the theme, just as you would pay for a nice BuddyPress theme. You can also build your own theme, or use some generic free theme from the WordPress themes repo if you prefer.
@hochingj Thanks!Somehow my last comment got deleted so posting again. This is Michael here.
I really appreciate the nice things you posted here about BuddyBoss. I’ve also enjoyed hanging out with you at many WordCamps, going years back. Our issues with BuddyPress are not that it is coded poorly or anything like that, I think the developers have done a tremendous job with what is there, and appreciate everything you have contributed to the project personally. Our main issue is just that it has evolved really slowly over the past 5 years, and the market has gotten way more competitive in that timeframe. This has hurt our ability to grow as a company. Customers are leaving BuddyPress and switching to more feature complete SaaS solutions. But then at the same time, they want to be able to customize everything like you can do in WordPress, and then they are stuck. There really is no solution available that has all the features people want, and is also available to customize and extend. So we are trying to address that for our customers. At the end of the day, BuddyPress is free to copy anything we do and merge or adapt it into BuddyPress; open source works both ways. Hopefully there are not too many hard feelings, we’re all working toward the same goal, but as you said, in different directions.
@hochingj Replying to your comment:
With as much as @buddyboss depends on buddypress and with how much they charge, I sure hope they are doing the ethical thing and donating to the buddypress group that they are profiting off of.
I think there is some misunderstandings here. First it is important to know that the BuddyBoss Platform is 100% free and open source. We do not charge for it, you can download it and develop on it for free right now. We are providing a feature rich and actively maintained plugin and we are funding all of the development and documentation for it out of pocket, and not charging anything for it. We did this because our business previously did depend on BuddyPress and our customers didn’t like what BuddyPress was offering, and we believed we could provide a better solution that met our customer’s needs, and so that is exactly what we did.
Our solution is open source just like BuddyPress, and we will open it up to contributors on Github shortly. If you want to contribute to our platform we will welcome you with open arms. Our only goal is to provide a great service to our customers, and our features are driven entirely by customer feedback.
We are profiting only on our theme, whose code is not pulling from anything created by the BuddyPress community. We no longer depend on BuddyPress to any extent for our new products so there is nothing for us to contribute to. We are contributing to the actual users of BuddyPress, by giving away a free version of BuddyPress that is more feature rich and developed at a faster pace, and is backwards compatible to BuddyPress, but not dependent on BuddyPress for its current and future development.
If you fast forward to a year from now our plugin will be very different from BuddyPress, even more so than it already is. The differences are big enough that it would have made little sense to try to do this through BuddyPress. We cannot depend on others to do what our customer base is asking us for. We need to move really fast, and BuddyPress moves really slow, and is actively adverse to growing its feature set too large. But our customers do not want a streamlined plugin, they do not want to depend on other plugins. They want all of the community features out of the box and integrated with each other, and as much as possible, they want that right now. We need the ability to take common requests and build solutions to those requests, without having to ask permission to someone else first. This is what our customers want from us and our obligation is to our customers above all else.
We appreciate your feedback.
Our support team is just about 24/7, some are in USA and some are overseas. We have people working on shifts covering all timezones. The delay in response is due to a large volume of tickets, we cannot always reply immediately. Many of the tickets are very technical, and some take hours to figure out. Some are our fault, some are not even related to us (server issues etc) but we need to spend time to figure them out just to determine that. We have increased our support agents significantly since launching the product, we now have a pretty large support staff. All of our metrics have improved since doing that – time to first response, time to solving the ticket, etc. We still have a lot of room for improvement, we are aware, but we are improving as fast as we possibly can.
Tier 3 is our actual development team that builds the product. So if your ticket is escalated to Tier 3, yes it will have a longer delay because now a developer is looking at your code… but it also means that if the issue is coming from our product, the person reviewing your ticket is also writing the patch so that we can issue a fix in an update.
Thanks for your feedback, it is appreciated and will be considered as we work to continuously improve our response times.
You could set a profile type as Business and then set profile fields for it that make sense for a business. That’s one option.
One issue people sometime run into is that they want users to have a profile that represents a person, and then also have some business content like listings etc which are associated with that person. So then you’re back to using BuddyPress for the profiles and needing another plugin for the business content.
So it really depends on what you’re trying to do. In most cases I think it’s cleaner to use a listing plugin and have it link to the buddypress profiles as the authors of the business listings.
You could also use Groups to represent businesses. But that makes more sense if they are representing a company with members (employees), like a Facebook page. If you just want “listings” it’s overkill and then you’ve also lost the ability to use groups later on for what they’re really meant for.
There is a plugin I really like for listings that is just simple to configure and use in my opinion. I have no affiliate with it, just have used it on some custom projects and found it easy to work with. This one, worth a look:
In terms of being locked in, there is no more lock-in with BuddyBoss vs BuddyPress. Both are free, open source plugins. And BuddyBoss is being more actively developed than BuddyPress actually.
It is very easy to toggle between the two while testing. We only have one migration script, which is for people who have used our old Media plugin to migrate their media posts. For all BuddyPress data there is no data migration necessary. The core data structure is intentionally the same.
The main work to switch is just switching your theme. As we have editing the templates quite a bit to achieve a nicer frontend experience.
As for putting the BuddyBoss Platform on Github, that will happen soon. This month or next. It’s actually on Github now we just need to document the contributor process and then make the repo public. We want developers to contribute to it. This has always been our plan, we’re just doing things carefully one step at a time. We’ll soon let customers vote on core features as well and then we can pick the most requested features and prioritize them.
@boonebgorges I hope BuddyPress continues to grow and improve. We based our whole business around BuddyPress for many years for a reason. I know it has taken a tremendous amount of work to get the plugin as far as it’s come, and we are grateful considering you guys have done all of this voluntarily. I can tell you from experience that even when you are paying a support team, it is still very difficult to stay on top of all the support requests, so to do it for free at any capacity should be appreciated.
WP community ALWAYS preaches to have as little plugins as possible – but get getting buddypress to be usable takes at least a dozen
That’s one of our primary goals, to fix this. We want our platform to have every feature you could need in a social network out of the box, in a unified experience both frontend and backend, and all optimized to work together. That’s the direction we are moving towards.
Hey Brajesh!
Sure, happy to provide some additional feedback.
I have tried your releases and I am still wondering what prevented you/your team from contributing to BuddyPress? Did you try to contribute or was there some other reason for fork?
There are a lot of reasons we decided to go our own way. The primary one is that at a very fundamental level, BuddyPress was not providing the experience our customers are looking for and was really holding us back in our ability to provide the features and usability they ask us for. We have many thousands of customers and do a large amount of custom development, and there are so many things they ask for and wish were different in BuddyPress. BuddyPress development moves very slowly, and the types of changes we have implemented and will continue to implement require major changes to BuddyPress, in a way that can only be done by forking the plugin. We do theme development and mobile app development, and it’s not good that the foundation we rely on for everything is not under our control, and actually has barely changed at all over the past 5 years. We need to control its direction completely to achieve what we are trying to do. We are making mobile apps and other things, and want complete vertical integration between everything to provide an amazing experience.
is there any future plan available for the platform?
We have a multi-year plan for features we want to add. We also build mobile apps that replicate BuddyPress functionality into a synchronized app, and we will continue to grow there over time. Now that we control our core platform we can move much faster.
The features we add are determined primarily by our customers. So the order in which things are added will depend to a large degree on what people ask for, and which requests have the highest volume of requests. We have a big support team responding to and noting requests.
One major area of focus right now is performance. With each release you will see the product get faster. BuddyPress falls apart when it has too many users. We plan to fix that.
Since the forking of BuddyPress, can you please provide what kind of new feature other than merging your own/others plugin into the bundle have your team added.
Sure, this is going to be a very long list. I am just listing the high level items, as we have done so many smaller changes throughout.
Layout
We have our new BuddyBoss Theme which is much more advanced than any BuddyPress theme. It is only possible because we forked BuddyPress and are able to change the templates as necessary to accomplish our designs. Because we control our platform now, we can be sure that every single feature added is always styled in a consistent way, and with a unified admin experience. It much more powerful, and simultaneously, simpler and lighter than anything we could provide before.
Profile Fields > Proper “Name” fields
BuddyPress has just one name field, which drives customers crazy. They want professional networks with First/Last Name, or private networks with just nickname. BuddyBoss Platform has dedicated name fields for First Name, Last Name, Nickname. The site admin can control how to display names sitewide using this. In BuddyPress it is actually impossible just to display First Name + Last Name in the profile and activity feed, something that 50% of customers want. In BuddyBoss it is very customizable. We also let users change their Nickname (handle) any time.
Profile Fields > Repeater Fields
This is a request we have gotten for years, and could never provide; the ability to have repeater fields (Jobs, Experience, etc) so you can make a profile like LinkedIn. That’s out of the box now.
Activity
We have completely overhauled activity feeds. Instead of separated tabs, which is super confusing, it’s one unified activity feed. And within the feed, we have added a bunch of features:
– Emoji
– Animated GIFs
– Likes
– Follow
– Link previews
– Media
– Ability to add any custom post type into the feed (via the Settings)
– Ability to enable/disable any default BP activity type (via the Settings)Messages
We have completely overhauled Messages. In BuddyPress, messages is a really poor experience. It uses a Gmail convention with subject and content, which makes little sense on a social network. We changed it into a single threaded message, just like Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and every other messenger works. This allows us to create a really amazing messaging experience (go play with our demo). Also we can extend this later into live chat, and messenger in our apps. Those features could not be built using BuddyPress messenger as it uses a Gmail style messenger. Imagine if Facebook messenger worked like Gmail, it would be awful.
Media
We added a native Media component for photos and albums, which provides a really amazing interface. It’s not just a fork of our old media plugin, it’s a total overhaul and is much nicer than anything out there for BuddyPress. And we will extend it over time for videos and other media.
Private Network
Out of the box, with one click you can make the whole site private from outsiders. This is a feature that more than 50% of BuddyPress users are doing but need to hunt for 3rd party plugins to figure out how to add. Our implementation is highly customizable also, in terms of what is public vs private.
Network Search
We added a new component for searching all content across the social network, with live results as you type. It’s not just a fork of our old BP Global Search plugin, it is a complete overhaul and is a much nicer experience.
User Invites
We added an invites system, to allow users to invite others into the network by email.
Profile Types
We added a built in interface for creating and managing Profile types, and many additional related options.
Group Types
We added a built in interface for creating and managing Group types, and many additional related options.
Group Hierarchies
We added a built in interface for creating and managing Group hierarchies, so you can have parent and child group relationships.
Email Layouts
Emails in BuddyPress look really bad. This is something we have had to hack up in the past on virtually every client site to give them something usable. Now, in BuddyBoss they look really beautiful out of the box, and are more customizable with logo options etc.
Default Data
This comes up constantly, people want to quickly add a bunch of default data into the site for testing. Now they can do it with the click of a button.
—
And… that’s just the high level stuff. We have fixed usability issues all over the place and added minor options throughout. And don’t forget that we have been live to the public for less than 2 months. There is much more to come and we are moving fast. Revisit this in a year from now, and the list will be endless.
Hey,
Michael from BuddyBoss chiming in here. I can’t speak for BuddyPress, but I do want to clarify some of what was mentioned about BuddyBoss.
It does not seem their fork will survive on its own(been following their updates from the first release till now) if the BuddyPress development ceases
This is definitely not the case. Right now if BuddyPress development ceased, it would have no impact at all on what we’re doing. We are no longer pulling code from BuddyPress since forking (besides security patches) and our development team is substantially larger than the core team of developers at BuddyPress. Also our developers are all paid, full time staff, so we are able to build features very rapidly. And we will eventually open up the plugin to allow others to contribute to it. We’re not going anywhere.
Other than that, no membership plugin has a vast eco system than BuddyPress(It has 500+ addons on wordpress plugin repo).
BuddyBoss Platform has the same ecosystem. We have taken great care to make it backwards compatible to BuddyPress and to make sure that any existing BuddyPress plugin works out of the box with BuddyBoss. And if it doesn’t, you can submit a support ticket and we’ll patch it so it works.
We have released a plugin to help with GDPR compliance: https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-gdpr/
This will be helpful for now, until there is a major BuddyPress release with these features.We just launched that plugin recently. It’s not breaking results down by user role (although we can consider that for a future update) but it will do everything else you’re asking for out of the box.
Default BP does allow to see other users’ Favorits in the Favorit tab in Profile page – why does Buddyboss kills this? At least site admin should be able to turn it on or off.
I see what you mean. We will consider adding an admin option.
Buddyboss is never meant to load every plugin but if a chosen few are bundled, it will be really good rather than re-inventing wheels at premium plugins, features of which are already available in the WP-BP repo. If users like us see thay they are well integrated into the Buddyboss look and feel there can be more sales of the Buddyboss theme actually.
I appreciate all of the feedback, very much. Our plan is to expand on these plugins and make them more feature rich, launch more premium plugins and themes, and also free plugins for the community over the year.
We launched two free plugins this week which you may be interested in:
Search all BP components in one unified dropdown:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-global-search/Edit BP activity from the front-end:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-edit-activity/1. We don’t have Liking in blog posts, only on activity streams posts.
2. You can see your own Likes in a tab, but not another user’s Likes. You see if they Liked a specific post, but the tab to see all of their Likes is only available to them for privacy reasons.
3. Works fine with Multisite. When we release our next theme we’ll be moving all theme demos to a single multisite install, already doing our beta testing there and it works fine. Works with BP Activity Privacy too (this is a popular companion plugin for many people using BB Wall plugin).
4. True, cannot tag directly on photo
Cannot do multiple photo upload simultaneously (this is a big feature request, will be built)
Media files not integrated in WP media etc (sort of, they are actually stored in WP Media, but user does not have access to all of that on front-end)5. Blog posting is done in admin like other themes. We do not yet have front-end blog posting. That will come in a future plugin we have planned.
6. Wall does not have every FB feature, but has a lot. The main purpose of it is to let you post on each other’s activity streams. Out of the box BP doesn’t let you do that. Our next theme has profile cover photos actually (coming soon). And we have a cover photo plugin coming soon as well.
8. Spam signups. We may make a spam solution at some point in time. This is a tricky one. Every solution you make only works for a bit, then the spammers figure out your tactic and update to counter it. It’s a cat and mouse game. We have some ideas, no timeline on this though.
Hey guys, this is Michael from BuddyBoss.
@style960 Thanks for the kind words 🙂Can you please share a link?
The next theme will be available later this month, so check back at buddyboss.com every so often and you’ll see it advertised there. It is an entirely new concept.
If you really want to play with it now, send an email to support at buddyboss dot com asking to be a beta tester, and I’ll let you in.
do you know how to contact the Buddyboss people for pre-sales queries?
Here I am, ask away 🙂
They seem to have no open forum
True, we used to have an open forum, but we had too many spam signups and closed it to customers only.
I submitted some queries via their contact form – and got no reply from them – its 4 days.
Sorry to hear. We are usually faster, but may have been slower due to the holiday season. What email did you send from? (you can PM me this if you prefer)
I visited the Buddyboss demo but it does not show how standard Blog post…
Here is a sample blog post:
http://www.buddyboss.com/demo/buddyboss/an-argument-for-simplicity/Front-end posting…
We are going to build a plugin for front-end blog posting. In general we prefer to put big features in plugins rather than themes, so they can work with any theme. Then we style that functionality in our themes so it looks really nice.
Do the Buddyboss people frequent this forum ? If they do and answered such queries it would be a good sign indeed.
I check out buddypress.org forums pretty frequently and answer questions 🙂
I found that most buddypress responsive themes are based on bootstrap – and since rtmedia loads a lot of bootstrap, and font awesome stuff, things would break when I put them together..
Agreed, bootstrap bloats stuff and causes problems. BuddyBoss themes (current and future) are just CSS and media queries. We’re not using bootstrap.
I see. I’m honestly not sure as I don’t know how the shortcode system is working. It sounds like it’s appending the Friends URI to the existing URL. I would contact the theme developer on this one.
Can you post the exact code you’re using to produce the button?
Fragment caching would be ideal, but that really needs to be built into BP core. You can do it on your own but you’ll be hacking up template files right and left and it will be hard to update later. A lot of effort if you don’t NEED it. I would suggest Object Caching as Paul Gibbs said.
Ideally you will use APC object caching as it’s really fast (stores cached values in RAM). If you use W3TC with file caching (default) it will not be as fast as it has to read from files.
Here’s a tutorial I wrote about how to enable Object Caching on BuddyPress:
Briefly:
If you are hosting with a VPS or other setup where you have server admin access, you can contact your web host and request that they install APC on your server (it’s free) and then it will be available to you as a very fast method for Object Caching. Generally you cannot install APC on a shared hosting environment. APC stores the cached values in RAM, which is why I recommend at least 2GB of RAM for ideal server performance.
Once your web host has confirmed that APC is installed and working, you will then need to enable it for WordPress with a plugin. My recommended method is with the APC Object Cache Backend plugin (as Paul Gibbs suggested). This is not a true plugin, but rather a “drop-in” file. As such, you do not actually activate the plugin. You just need to copy the object-cache.php file into your /wp-content/ directory. You don’t even need to upload the actual plugin. That’s it! As long as you have APC installed on your server and have placed the file correctly, APC-powered Object Caching should now be enabled and you should begin seeing performance improvements. To confirm that it’s working, you can type this into your browser while logged in as an admin: http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?plugin_status=dropins (change yourdomain.com!). It should show APC Object Cache as a drop-in, and if so, you now have a good caching method enabled.
And here’s a tutorial for setting up a CDN with WordPress/BuddyPress. This makes such a big difference and is really easy and cheap to set up. A no brainer.
Here’s a tutorial I wrote about how to enable Object Caching on BuddyPress:
Briefly:
If you are hosting with a VPS or other setup where you have server admin access, you can contact your web host and request that they install APC on your server (it’s free) and then it will be available to you as a very fast method for Object Caching. Generally you cannot install APC on a shared hosting environment. APC stores the cached values in RAM, which is why I recommend at least 2GB of RAM for ideal server performance.
Once your web host has confirmed that APC is installed and working, you will then need to enable it for WordPress with a plugin. My recommended method is with the APC Object Cache Backend plugin (as Paul Gibbs suggested). This is not a true plugin, but rather a “drop-in” file. As such, you do not actually activate the plugin. You just need to copy the object-cache.php file into your /wp-content/ directory. You don’t even need to upload the actual plugin. That’s it! As long as you have APC installed on your server and have placed the file correctly, APC-powered Object Caching should now be enabled and you should begin seeing performance improvements. To confirm that it’s working, you can type this into your browser while logged in as an admin: http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?plugin_status=dropins (change yourdomain.com!). It should show APC Object Cache as a drop-in, and if so, you now have a good caching method enabled.
You could use
bp_loggedin_user_domain()which will direct you to the current logged in user’s profile. Then append the link structure to the content you’re trying to take them to.So for example, this would take you to the current logged in user’s Change Avatar screen.
<a class="button" href="<?php echo bp_loggedin_user_domain() ?>profile/change-avatar">Change Avatar</a>Also is there a specific error message? Or, it just doesn’t work…?
You could try this: http://buddydev.com/plugins/buddypress-activity-comment-notifier/
