[Gomle]

I am glad to hear that a v.14 is planned!
For 10 years I’ve tried to build something with buddypress, but I have never been able to launch a completed project, as I haven’t had the skills to make it as functional as it needed to be.

I am one of those guys that have used wordpress + various other members plugin + freelancer to make what I want.

Every community is different – so is the ones I’ve tried to make, and more often than not I haven’t needed 60% of the functionality coming out of the box in buddypress. But there are always something missing, at least for what I wanted to use Buddypress for.

In version 14 I hope to see more functionality (presented in a clear way for the users) towards user-interacting: Easy to use notification system for 100% of interactions between users.

All notifications is so, so important – as this is the way to bring members back. “Lila has sent you a message, click here to see”, “You got a new friend request”, “Someone replied to your topic”.. This brings people back, helping to grow the community!

So: Live popups and emails + bell notifications for:
Private messages, new bbpress replies / new topics, bbpress mentions, commenting, like buttons, added, follows, friend requests, accepted friend request, rejected friend requests, rating of content, e.g posts, forum posts etc.

And the entire notification system must be easy to use for both members and the admins!
Not all admins have coding skills. We just need an easy way to implement a bell in the header, which nicely presents new notifications. Small things like that is what I’ve been looking for.

And I have often found that 50% of it is working as I hoped, but then the other 50% is just not there. Forcing me to go to Freelancer, and from the developers over there, getting told: “You don’t need such a heavy tool like buddypress to accomplish this. Let me fix it for you just using wordpress and UsersWP”.

[Gomle]

Hello, and thank you for all the great work!

I have been using WordPress for about 15 years. I started my first online community in 2008.
I then chose not to use Buddypress, because at the time it was fine with a forum. Facebook hadn’t invented its activity wall yet, and people didn’t expect too much.

Now in 2022 I am in the process of re-launching this old online community again, after it has been dead for a number of years. (Mostly because Facebook arrived)
Meanwhile, I’ve been using WordPress & Woocommerce a lot – last couple of years – with Gutenberg and Blocks. An absolutely fantastic solution to a lot of problems!

If you use WordPress, it’s because you can do something yourself, but you can’t do everything.

I was therefore really looking forward to getting started with Buddypress in relation to the relaunch I’m about to start, but I was a little disappointed when I saw that it is not at all possible to use gutenberg to style the absolutely required pages. For example Register, Profile, Members, Activity etc.

I think many who now use WordPress are people who want to own their own information, have 100% control, and to shape something themselves out of their own creativity. They may have some knowledge, but not always enough to do programming, or to go deep into css and theme design etc. They don’t have time for that either.

Gutenberg blocks are therefore the perfect bridge between those who know a LITTLE, but need the help of software to do the rest, and who want to create something quickly.
I think there are many of us..

WordPress scores highly here with blocks and easy solutions.

You can now use Kadence Theme + Gutenberg blocks to create almost anything you want.

I’m not a programmer myself, but I own a couple of companies. Much of the joy is being able to create something, see it being used, make it work – and I can do that by using blocks.

I’ve gone back and forth between Buddypress and Buddyboss, after I realized that Buddypress doesn’t yet have this functionality and tried to think what I really want.
With Buddyboss, I get a great theme, and it has all the functionality I need – but I’m completely locked into just that. Also, I’m not very impressed with companies that take credit for a product that was originally created by someone else. That is why I prefer to use Buddypress, and I also see Buddypress as the authority here.

I think you Buddypress developers will be able to deliver something more in the future, than what I expect from a company working with a product not originally made by themselves.

But still I see it difficult using Buddypress as it would turn out to be much more expensive, since I have to contact someone at upWork to do it the way I want it.
To many people it would be more logical to pay a couple of hundred dollars to be able to start tomorrow.

So my contribution to the discussion is perhaps not a secret: Make buddypress elements ready to use as blocks. And make sure to market it as a “point and click system with Gutenberg”

Additionally, specifically for my online community, I will need:
– Forums
– Private messaging
– Notification system
– Nice looking user profiles
– Speedy site
– Friends
– Follow friends
– Moderation system for both community and forums.