BuddyPress.org

Hey everyone. Thank you for the insightful conversation. This is exactly what forums and communities are for, and is a great example of why it is so important to have them.

This question has come up just about every 180 days for the past 10 years, for both bbPress and BuddyPress. I usually don’t chime in on them, because they almost always go through the same motions:

1. Some people are worried
2. Some people don’t like the core functionality
3. Some people think it’s too difficult
4. Some people think it’s not powerful enough
5. Development team defends the project
6. Unhappy people trash the project
7. Nobody really feels much better
8. People get bored and the topic fades away
9. Someone bumps it back up every once in a while

I’m replying here and now, because I agree a lot with everything everyone has said here, even if I don’t like or agree with how it’s said.

There are a lot of things about BuddyPress not to like. There has been a lot of added complexity over the years that has made it more difficult to understand and to work with. Building a community website with it takes a long time and requires a lot of experience to do well, and that’s even before the community has activity, membership, or growth.

Without a big huge obvious whale of an example community, and without a big huge corporate sponsor, it’s hard to see the penultimate standard for what BuddyPress can be used to achieve.

Because BuddyPress.org and bbPress.org are part of the WordPress.org network of sites, and because WordPress.org doesn’t really use the social features that BuddyPress provides, even it isn’t that great of an example anymore.

The folks at BuddyBoss have, no doubt, invested nearly the same ten years as the rest of us have, working hard to make something out of nothing, only with a different set of goals in mind, that now is taking them in an exciting new direction.

Having met several members of the BuddyBoss family, and after spending more than a few hours hanging out with them through the years at various WordPress related events, it cuts deep to hear how negative their perspective is on BuddyPress, but I don’t disagree with them, or think they’re wrong.

Ten years ago when everyone was excited about BuddyPress, wasn’t because of the technology or the tools or the potential. It was a pain in the butt to setup. It required a version of WordPress (MU) that didn’t even come with an installer. It did everything “the wrong way” and not “the WordPress way.”

Everyone was excited because it looked cool.

Source: Venturebeat

While not an exact clone, BuddyPress 1.0 popularized the 3 column design layout that Slack, Discord, Teams, and Mattermost, and others have built empires on top of today. Since 2.0 and later, we listened to user feedback instead of our guts, and worked to make BuddyPress simpler to drop into any WordPress installation, but in doing so we sacrificed the opinionated design that made all of us curious about what we could build on top it ourselves.

I believe BuddyPress is, still to this day, the single most important piece of software on the open web. It empowers anyone to foster free and open dialogue with the privacy and freedom of having their own website on their own hardware, while also being powerful enough to scale up and grow as a community of people garners momentum. And it empowers people like the folks at BuddyBoss to grow even beyond BuddyPress itself.

BuddyPress also continues to be a faithful sister-project to WordPress, bbPress, and GlotPress, acting as a playground for just about anyone to jump in and start helping improve the software that over 11 million users on WordPress.org and 300k other installations rely on to power their activity streams, member profiles, and more.

I personally have met or know a few hundred people that have amazing careers (in WordPress or elsewhere) because of the knowledge and insight that contributing to the BuddyPress project has trained them for. (This is one of the most valuable things about BuddyPress that you can’t write on the tin, in my opinion.)

To the folks that feel like leaving BuddyPress behind, happy trails until we meet again. And I hope we meet more often than we have, because our diversity of experiences and opinions is how we forge great open source software together, and that’s hard to find when you’re always looking inward at the same project for this long.

To the folks that love BuddyPress as much as I do, thanks for sticking around and helping out and being a part of this community here. The best is yet to come, with media attachments, database improvements, deeper WordPress Admin integration, and if wishes were fishes we’d revive a retro bp-sn-parent theme to bring some of that old excitement back again.

Here’s a corny quote from a favorite movie of mine that feels fitting:

I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.

@buddyboss Why didn’t you contribute to the buddypress code instead of creating competition off of thousands of hours of donated development for this free plugin?

Hi @welshlamb10

I’m sorry I can’t replicate what I’m understanding of your issue. Let’s be sharp in explanations!

Here’s what I did.
1/ Added a regular user to 2 hidden groups (A, B)
2/ loggedin as this user.
3/ Posted an update from Group A then being an admin I’ve edited the date of this update so that she appears when clicking on load more only.
4/ As the regular user I’m going on Group B’s activity stream, click on load more multiple times and all I can see is activities from Group B.

Could you:
1/ Reproduce the bug on your site,
2/ Note in details the different steps you did to reproduce it,
3/ Share these details like I did above ?

Thanks in advance.

About BuddyBoss, I was speaking of this other issue: BuddyBoss Media (upload image icon) no longer displays for certain mobile devices. I can’t imagine a scenario where BuddyPress would be involved on the “upload image icon” vanishing for a Plugin output..

Hi,

First I’m sorry to read about these issues. I’ve just tested the first item of your list with latest BuddyPress, WordPress and Twenty Nineteen theme.

I confirm that when I’m on the activity page of an hidden group and after scrolling down to load more activities, only the activities of this group are displayed.

Have you tried to deactivate all plugins except BuddyPress, remove custom code, and switch to a Twenty “Something” theme to see if you still had the issue?

About 404 on posts page, is it when you click on a the link of an activity relative to a page (meaning you activated the Site Tracking component and added some custom code to track the page post type) ?

About BuddyBoss Media, have you tried to reach their support team ?

FYI, this support topic explains how you can trouble shoot in case of issues, I advise you to read it.

hello!

This post shares how it is possible to hide group activity on the main activity feed. Some easy method to do your activity:

Activating User Wall Posting on BuddyPress
Go to Settings > BuddyPress > Components.
Make sure both “Friend Connections” and “Activity Streams” are enabled.
Go to the Settings > BuddyBoss Wall menu in your Dashboard.
Configure the options as required for your site.
You should now be able to go any user’s profile and write on his or her Wall.

Thanks.

I am eager to introduce BuddyBoss’ latest release to my members, but unfortunately I have run into a bit of a nightmare.

I purchased the platform / theme for around $225 nearly six weeks ago. I have tried for weeks to try and get the theme/platform to function properly (including on three different test environments), but unfortunately I run into different errors every time (including on fresh WordPress installs to rule out there’s any previous plugin interference).

The support from BB, especially in the last two weeks, has basically been non-existent. I have to virtually beg for a reply. Right now they say there’s a Tier 3 support team looking into things, but an entire week has gone by and no one from that team has reached out.

Wish I could say I’ve had a good experience thus far, and am not ruling out using them still because I have invested a lot of time and energy trying to make it work, but so far I’m pretty disappointed. I’m at the point where I’m asking them if I should invest in hiring a developer so I can move things forward. Doesn’t feel right to have to hire a developer to make something that should be working… work.

I hope I can come back to this post in the near future and say BB has helped me turn things around.

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.

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 🙂

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.

Hi,
BuddyPress.org is not shutting down. The next version of BuddyPress will be available on 15th.
You can follow the development here
https://github.com/buddypress/BuddyPress

and for the upcoming REST API here
https://github.com/buddypress/BP-REST

BuddyBoss’s fork is mega bundle of BuddyPress and a few other plugins(bbpress, bp-profile search, and a few others) with minor enhancements. 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. Consider it as a distribution that bundles some needed functionality together than a real fork(atleast until now).

There have been many community plugin available in past(ultimate members, user ultra and I can recall 4-5 others) which have been doing well. There will be even more.

The choice should be based on your needs. Using a commercially supported plugin provides better support which BuddyPress lacks currently. If support is important, BuddyPress may not be the best choice.

Other than that, no membership plugin has a vast eco system than BuddyPress(It has 500+ addons on wordpress plugin repo).

Hope it clarifies and helps you decide.

Regards
Brajesh

You should ask BuddyBoss about that.
And you should probably switch to their BuddyBoss Platform.

Though I wonder what the benefit of creating a new fork/platform over – separate paid-premium plug-ins and hyper tuned themes..

Still I love buddyboss themes – but being locked in is a headache I would not ever try to think about..

Frankly I’ve always been deeply frustrated with buddypress though..

I use buddyboss and I LOVE what they do…

but.. im a little nervous .. with the change over.

Its worth pointing out that there OUTSTANDING themes are still available for normal buddypress..