BuddyPress.org

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.

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

I’m working on a plugin to allow you to report and track the report of pretty much anything in BuddyPress. How soon this is ready for use rather depends on if I write it by myself or others chip in to help.

Hey @lordmatt i appreciate your effort and i would like to help with my level of capability i am not very good at php but could help you in the front UI part if you want and i also think other should also join us such as @ventius please consider this effort from the buddypress community

Not sure if this is still relevant, but you can easily remove the email address field without having to remove the entire page. This can be accomplished by editing the BuddyPress template files you copied into your WordPress theme (wp-content/themes/mytheme/buddypress).

The file you will want to edit is named general.php and is located in “wp-content/themes/mytheme/buddypress/members/single/settings”. Once you locate general.php, simply delete the following code located around line 27 and 28.

<label for="email"><?php _e( 'Account Email', 'buddypress' ); ?></label>
	<input type="email" name="email" id="email" value="<?php  echo bp_get_displayed_user_email(); ?>" class="settings-input" <?php bp_form_field_attributes( 'email' ); ?>/>

Presto! No more email field 🙂

Customizing BuddyPress Avatars