BuddyPress.org

BuddyPress Moderator

I don’t there is anything that matches exactly what you are after but the above thread lists plugins for reporting if that is any use.

Thanks a lot for your interesting suggestions @coolhunt. I agree we need to talk about how we can improve BuddyPress documentation and about how to find help to start using/resolve issues.

We are currently working on the next major version of BuddyPress (5.0.0). As soon as it’s released, I’ll start a discussion about it from our Development news blog.

PS: really happy you like the work accomplished in Bowe Codes (although it would benefit from some improvements, but that’s another topic 😉 )

Hi @coolhunt

Everybody is welcome to contribute to BuddyPress, here are possible ways to do so https://codex.buddypress.org/participate-and-contribute/

Writing documentation, helping others in support forums or translating BuddyPress in other languages are examples of contributions which does not require development skills.

Hey, do you know what version of BuddyPress you upgraded from?
I think there used to be guides on steps required for really old versions

Hi @m4soN – The easiest place to add custom CSS is in the Customizer. See https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-add-custom-css-to-your-wordpress-site/.

Once there, you’ll need to learn a bit about how CSS works to make the changes you want to change. Without knowing more about what “very ugly” means, it’s hard to give specific instructions. But let’s say you wanted to increase the field padding. You might introduce the following CSS:

.buddypress-wrap .bp-tables-user tr td {
  padding: 20px;
}

Here’s some more info about getting started with CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Introduction_to_CSS

The function responsible for creating the notices is bp_nouveau_template_notices(). For example, if you override the buddypress/members/single/profile/edit.php template, you can insert <?php bp_nouveau_template_notices(); ?> just above the tabs, and the notices will show there. (They’ll also show in the original spot, which you could hide with some targeted CSS.)

To make a similar change without overriding the template, try the following:

add_action( 'bp_before_profile_field_content', 'bp_nouveau_template_notices' );

Hi @sibahmed, and thanks for the post!

Unfortunately, BuddyPress doesn’t have these kinds of fields built in. They’re called “nested” or “conditional” fields, and they’ve been requested in the past – see https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/579. It’s a large job to build it as a feature for BuddyPress, though it’d be easier to build a custom tool for yourself that does this.

If you’ve got the technical experience, you could a custom BP_XProfile_Field_Type, whose edit logic would contain the markup and JavaScript to enable these sorts of fields. I did some quick searching, and it looks like someone was writing this at some point – see https://rimonhabib.com/coming-up-next-buddypress-nested-conditional-fields/. Maybe worth following up there?

@boonebgorges I hope BuddyPress continues to grow and improve. We based our whole business around BuddyPress for many years for a reason. I know it has taken a tremendous amount of work to get the plugin as far as it’s come, and we are grateful considering you guys have done all of this voluntarily. I can tell you from experience that even when you are paying a support team, it is still very difficult to stay on top of all the support requests, so to do it for free at any capacity should be appreciated.

Hi @cassel – Thanks for the post!

I’ve just installed All In One SEO to try to reproduce. Looks like the line numbers have changed – I’m seeing 5711 now, instead of 4735! – but the error is still there.

Looking into the all-in-one-seo-pack code, it appears that this error only occurs if you haven’t yet saved the options for this plugin. Once you’ve done so, the error ought to go away.

For the record, I was able to trigger this notice even without BuddyPress.

I’ve opened a ticket with the All In One folks to let them know about the bug on their end, so stay tuned at https://github.com/semperfiwebdesign/all-in-one-seo-pack/issues/2805 ! In the meantime, you might consider forcing errors not to be displayed on your production site – always a good idea. See https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-turn-off-php-errors-in-wordpress/

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 🙂

Hi Michael,
Thank you for sharing the insight and the goals. It helped.

I agree with your business objectives and the fork makes sense for your customer.

I am sure looking forward to see how your team speeds up BuddyPress. It should be easy for the community to port that to BuddyPress core.

I have been an admirer of your designs. Wish you and your team all the best!

@coolhunt,
I agree with you on the issues with BuddyPress. I hope that things will change in future.
Please do note that number of plugins is not an issue(even if it is 50 or 100). It is a misconception propagated by few. It is the quality of the plugins. Number of plugins don’t have much effect on speed. Keeping it to the minimum helps you remain secure( low number means lower chance of having an insecure plugin) and easy management of the plugins.

Regards
Brajesh

WP community ALWAYS preaches to have as little plugins as possible – but get getting buddypress to be usable takes at least a dozen

That’s one of our primary goals, to fix this. We want our platform to have every feature you could need in a social network out of the box, in a unified experience both frontend and backend, and all optimized to work together. That’s the direction we are moving towards.

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.

Hi Michael,
Thank you for sharing your views here.

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. Also, is there any future plan available for the platform?

It is nice to know that you plan to open the platform for contribution in future. 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?

It will help understand the decision better.

Thank you
Brajesh

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.