Reply To: Buddypress.org shutting down
BuddyPress is not approaching EOL. As @sbrajesh noted above, BP is coming up on a 5.0 release that’ll include, among other improvements, REST API endpoints for our major content types. The development team believes this is going to be an important step in making BuddyPress more powerful as a foundation for community development.
I acknowledge that the amount of activity on the project has not been consistent over the last year or two. The BuddyPress project – the development of the plugin itself as well as the manning of these support forums – is 100% volunteer driven. BuddyPress is not a business, and as such, no one is paid by BP to work on BP. The central group of volunteers who work on BP development and support is pretty small, which means it’s quite sensitive to fluctuation in activity; if just one or two active members get busy with other work for a while, it can have a significant effect on the pace of the project. In contrast, Michael and Brajesh are both correct when they note that businesses with paid employees are able to devote a much more concentrated and consistent amount of effort to their products.
While it’s disappointing that the BuddyBoss team’s improvements haven’t been integrated into BP, I completely understand the reasons why their team has opted to fork rather than contribute. Personnel issues aside, the pace of development of a widely-used open source project, developed in a decentralized way with loose management, is necessarily going to be slower and more conservative than a private product. And it makes sense that a business owner would want 100% control over the direction of their core products. I respect the BuddyBoss folks and wish them the best of luck with their platform.
All this being said, I continue to believe that BuddyPress is the best community solution of its type, particularly for those users who need maximum flexibility and customizability. My limited experience with BP’s direct competitors in the WP market is that they work nicely for their central use case, but it’s extremely difficult to modify the default behavior.
As someone who’s been involved in BP for a long time and cares a great deal about the project, I must extend thanks to the folks in this thread who are here, demonstrating their concern for the well-being of BuddyPress 🙂
