BuddyPress.org

Awesome. I’ll have to give this a try. I’m exploring responsive themes atm. My site’s not very responsive at all and that spooks me out. hehe.

That’s a style applied from BuddyPress’s JavaScript as it’s meant to ‘grow’ as it’s in focus.

`jq(“form#whats-new-form textarea”).animate({
height:’50px’
});`
– global.js

It’s probably good to either keep that or have some indicator in your theme when someone clicks into that area.

You can do responsive but it’s not so easy with content such as profiles and forums. Because of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. users are expecting something dedicated and streamlined.

Theme compatibility means you get a good experience out of the box and that’s great but if you want a true community theme you want one designed to do that. I’d say if it did ever link it should with the ‘buddypress’ tag as we should still be creating and celebrating themes that are designed for communities ‘made for BuddyPress’ if you like.

well there are still things that can be done with themes designed specifically for buddypress granted the selection might be different but personally i’d say theres still value in highlighting themes which are particularly novel in terms of their buddypress related design.

just my 2 cents 🙂

@bphelp @ubernaut Thanks for your reply!

@synaptic as said before i would certainly agree that visitors is not the best way to gauge usage but it is the industry standard for this kind of hosting. These hosts are not simply slapping a few plugins on and calling it “wordpress hosting” at least not wp engine’s case. i know that people love to hate on dreamhost but their vps was fairly decent.

one thing i would say also is that you almost never know with the smaller hosting companies who you are actually buying your hosting from a lot of ‘hosts’ are simply reselling others’ services under their own brand. Oversell is common throughout the hosting world, always has been and just because your host maybe under capacity today doesn’t mean a thing if you outgrow them or they outgrow you. Fact of the matter is if you run buddypress then you are in the top 1% of sites in terms of server resources required to run your site, managed scalable wp hosting is a good solution for many situations, imo.

@bphelp it depends on who the host is, find a good one and you’ll be just fine (webhostingtalk forum is the best place to start looking for a quality host that is affordable). you can find shared hosting that is *better* quality than some VPS out there, you have to do your homework! shared, reseller, VPS, etc. these are all labels and you have to scratch to get at the real stuff underneath as well as the host’s reputation and service history

@ubernaut I reject completely the notion that counting visits is acceptable. This is hosting we are talking about! just because a few hosts have started calling themselves by a new tag ‘wordpress’ does not mean they are doing anything different or special. It is still just plain old hosting.  And as I said, you don’t need ‘staff’, you can get a freelancer to set up your site and plugins for $50 or so depending on the complexity. And once it is set, it is set. Instead of paying monthly, you pay once for that as it should be. And then you pay a reasonable fee for hosting monthly or annually.

ps dreamhost? seriously?!? c’mon! do yourself a favor and drop by the forum I mentioned. You’ll thank me for it. There are smaller and medium size hosting co. you’ve never heard of but they are the BEST and they have the rep to prove it (as well as great prices).

well his article is not really on this site he was just promoting the article here and i’ve seen some be far more blatantly self promoting in their posts. Anyway i would say that putting an affiliate link attached to a review/comparison certainly calls into question the objectivity of the author, generally speaking.

Regarding WP Engine i think you over simplifying you analysis of the situation, @synaptic. First off it is standard practice amongst the managed wordpress specialty hosts to charge by visitor count. I would be the first to agree that its probably not he bet way to count usage and lends itself to discrepancy but so far at least they have been more then reasonable with me at least about not holding my customers to the inflated numbers. Also they offer way more then just an optimized platform, all they do is wordpress granted if you are extremely experienced or well staffed you can achieve what they offer for probably less money but if you cannot devote that level of time or resources to your own infrastructure wp engine (as well as the other wp specialty hosts I’m sure) provides a real value. Our site runs quite bit faster and more securely on their platform then it did with a basically whole vps (2 in fact) on dreamhost.

back to @cannedbear ‘s question @ 25K per month you are really talking about 1000 per day or on average about 5 or 10 at any given time during a week day. Even at that level i would not personally recommend any shared hosting for buddypress and in fact i’d say at that level you probably wouldn’t want shared hosting for any wordpress site, remember site/page load time is one of the top factors now in determining your page rank in google search results (at least according to google).

@cannedbear shared servers suck. Just from my experience I had a small private community with less than 10 members and I did a lot of heavy development on it and after one year the host scrapped and locked me out of my account saying it was a resource hog and that I would need to upgrade my account without any prior notice. Anyway, that is my experience.

I don’t mean to take the discussion on a tangent but am curious, what is buddypress.org’s policy regarding affiliate links? The article’s conclusion is an affiliate link which for now I’ll accept is because Ben truly does like WPE and that is why he’s recommending them, not the commissions. So I’d like this clarified by a moderator so we know where the board stands officially (@mercime ?)

Getting back into the discussion, WPengine is unnecessarily expensive.  Buddypress users can get the same (and more) functionality with a few free and very low priced plugins at a fraction of the cost.

For example, using proper speed optimization methods (minify, cache, etc.) as well as free backup plugins and CDNs (1 TB of transfer for $40/year) – I won’t mention names here but you can easily find out the most popular CDN for wordpress and that is its price.

Even if you are a novice, setting up a few plugins is easy. If it isn’t, you can get someone to set it up for you at fiverrr or similar freelancer sites (freelancer, elancer, odesk, etc.) for very cheap.

The net result is a rock solid buddypress+wordpress install that runs blazingly fast and has daily backup. And the price? a very small fraction of WPengine’s price. I have this on a shared hosting plan with a great quality host found at webhostingtalk and my cost is $14/month at 200 GB bandwidth/month.

PS I just noticed that WPengine prices their plans according to ‘visits’ instead of the hosting industry standard of GB or TB of data transferred per month. This is disingenuous at best and downright sleazy at worst. Yet another reason to stay awaaaay!

WHy not use a responsive design

Hi,
I am new to Buddypress and just launched my first Buddypress Community on a shared Server. It is not allowed to run any tests like JMeter or soapUI. How can I estimate how many users my website is able to handle?
In the Bp-tricks article it says the WP-Engine personal hosting plan can handle up to 25.000 visitors a month. Has anyone experience with shared server and how much they handle?

It’s worth noting that in the past, BuddyPress created bbPress 1.1’s roles in the same global namespace as WordPress’s blog roles. This is suboptimal, as it requires a user to be EITHER an Author, or a Moderator, or an Editor, or a Member.

Most people will want an Editor to ALSO be a Moderator, or an Admin to ALSO be a Key Master.

bbPress 2.2 and beyond allow for a user to have multiple roles on sites (in a network) that have bbPress active on them. On other sites without bbPress active, users still have regular old roles.