BuddyPress.org

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