BuddyPress.org

A newbie here chiming in,

Buddyboss looks promising. I bought a license for the boss theme to use with their fork of the platform. Some observational points:

The boss theme is nice, but is missing some very basic functions on the mobile version (search being one). Support would not say when it would be implemented, just that it is “on the todo list”

There is no dedicated support forum for buddyboss (at least that I can find). As a paying user, you do get access to the support ticketing system. But a forum for (even paying) users would be nice.

Their feature “roadmap” is “coming soon” and has been for at least a month

Their ‘Get Support’ is also “coming soon”

Their “Contribute’ is also coming soon

At this time they are giving a hard sell on their product licenses. Including a “lifetime deal” for $1000.

Don’t get me wrong, as a developer I am happy to pay for features that will serve my customers, but without the above items (especially the feature roadmap), I am very reluctant to shell out more cash for something that “might (never) be”.

So for now it is a waiting game with a periodic pinging of their website to see when and if anything changes.

Thanks for your input Cool Hunt. Can you direct me to any BuddyBoss or BuddyPress site which I could join as a user? Is there perhaps a directory of such sites somewhere?

Here’s 2 cents of input from a new comer…

It’s great that BuddyPress is free, that’s certainly an important part of the market to serve, and I applaud members for doing so. Truly.

However, there’s a downside to free too, nobody is obligated to the user, as is the case with paid software. So for example, if I were to succeed in my goals I’d have a social site full of serious professional people, who aren’t going to be easy for me to attract as they are already quite busy. I can’t afford to invest tons of time in winning them over, and then have some software let me down.

So I’m looking for some situation such as I have with a WordPress.com paid account, where if something technical goes wrong they jump on it immediately and fix it, and I can stay focused on content, marketing, networking etc. The WordPress support team says they would help me with BuddyPress if they could, but it’s not their software so there’s only so much help I can expect, which seems entirely reasonable to me.

I could come here for assistance, but I would have paid the BuddyPress team nothing, so it wouldn’t be reasonable for me to expect help unless somebody just happens to feel like it on that particular day.

So as seen from here, BuddyBoss is not really competing with BuddyPress, but providing a different kind of service, a commercial service. The downside with BuddyBoss, best I can tell, is that BuddyBoss isn’t really up and running yet. You know, they’ve been unable to point me to a single one of their client’s sites, a limitation they explained to me quite promptly and politely.

Wordpress.com has a theme which offers some level of social site features, but so far I’ve been unable to make any sense of it. If it’s confusing to me, it will likely also be to any new users I am able to attract.

So my first impression is that BuddyPress appears to be interesting hobby software generously provided for free, but if I want a more serious setup I’ll have to start looking beyond the WordPress environment.

I have an update for adding situations… since nobody from BuddyPress helps or seems to get on this site anymore, I guess I’ll post this for anyone who needs this.

(Maybe that’s why BuddyBoss came out?)

Anyway, I got the situations to show up by going changing to:

plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-taxonomy.php and changing line #39 ‘show_in_menu’ to true instead of false.

This makes it show up and you can change everything and add new ones.

@buddyboss Hey Michael!

I totally understand what you mean. I feel the same way about WordPress. Even simple whitespace changes there become endless discussions that result in no changes and no agreement, and worse… no fun.

My own personal concern here, comes from everyone involved in BuddyPress purposely trying to create an inviting, open, fun, rewarding experience to contribute to the project, and seeing talented folks like yourselves choose to compete instead of collaborate is the opposite of the target we are shooting for as a project.

What more could BuddyPress have done? What could the team have done differently? I’ve never really seen much in the way of upstream improvements or recommendations or requests in Trac or the forums from your team. Not that it’s necessary. Not that it’s expected. But there isn’t a history of anyone saying no or shutting y’all down.

I applaud the independence. I wish all y’all nothing but the best. And I hope BuddyPress is inspired from the creativity and inventiveness that BuddyBoss is known for.

I’m totally new to the BuddyPress universe. So far I’ve been unable to find any site which uses either BuddyPress or BuddyBoss. I’m sure they exist, just can’t find them. Posted that question on this forum, no reply yet. Emailed BuddyBoss, and they politely informed me they have no way of connecting me with any of their client sites so that I can try their system.
Gotta say, so far my first impression is that none of this is ready for prime time.

FYI, while I’m ignorant of all things BuddyPress, I have been working online since 1995 and have coded my own blog and forum software from scratch.

Anyway, I’m hoping to be able to join anybody’s BuddySomething site so I can experience this software as a user. Activism sites would be ideal, but any site will do. Thanks for any advice.

@jjj

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.

Hello all – I’d like to agree with the quote below from @johnjamesjacoby

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.

@buddyboss – Any cool improvements that can be ported back to buddypress would be appreciated I’m sure (^_^)

@coolhunt – yes there are issues I agree, its not been easy and I refer you to the quote above from @johnjamesjacoby | lol @ below, funee and looks like we are in the same boat together!

Does anyone have a good simple beautiful free theme that just works for BP.
Im using 2020 on a project and its horrible…
please please help obiwan save us

@sbrajesh – BuddyDev website is very nice, good work.

No-on active in the IRC channel? Some other communities I follow have nice integrations with IRC and Slack.

I’d love to contribute any way that I can and have registered to show my support for “the single most important piece of software on the open web”

Great work, thank you

I stand by what I said.

@buddyboss makes great themes and products but its premium.
— as great as the free plugin is.. –a site administrator will benefit great by implement the buddyboss premium theme.

Dare I say that — the free plugin looses its appeal without the utilization of a premium theme.

I personally love the “Boss.” theme ($129USD) and the “OneSocial” theme($99USD). — Though I havent used them in the past 2 years – I suspect they are still of great quality. I also havent used the “BuddyBoss Theme” (Which starts at $228USD)

The new Buddyboss Theme looks a lot like FB and seems like a great option for someone that wants a great looking turnkey solution.

The BuddyBoss Platform plugin is free.
Their themes and support for the Platform are not free.

Go here to get the free plugin – scroll down to
“Download the free BuddyBoss Platform Plugin”

@wfdeanb
If you want something turnkey.. i’d go with @buddyboss https://www.buddyboss.com/online-community-software/

– its pretty fast to get started
– it works out of the box
– its literally the fastest and easiest way to get what you described (there theme even looks like FB)
– premium (not free)

(disclaimer: I dont work for buddyboss nor am i an affiliate)

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.

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..