BuddyPress.org

https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/buddypress.10.4.0.zip @aannibali

Hi Mathieu, thanks for pointing out the declining figures about BP adoption.

Given I am relatively new to BP, I won’t comment on what I think is needed from a technical point of view. As I get acquainted with BP I find that I really like the product and it seems flexible enough for my needs.

I will add, though, that, the decline in BP usage should be put in context. While BP adoption seems to be going down, are there competing products that are increasing in market share?

One possible issue is that this is a community-driven product. Its contributors are volunteers.

This kind of product tends to lag behind similar products which are profit-funded. Let’s not forget the old marketing adage “You could have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, what’s the point?”.

So yes, perhaps increased marketing for BP should be a starting point.

The other thing I’d look at is documentation. WordPress has excellent documentation. Its market share keeps going up and has done so for years.

Could the limited documentation be a factor here?

Currently I have limited knowledge of the product but I would be happy to contribute and help where I can to improve the current docs (pinging @johnjamesjacoby, @shanebp or @djpaul for this).

No matching template found or blank template page. Version 10.5.0
Latest WordPress Version with Latest Theme Version.

My site is an intranet of an organization and as I have told you Mathieu I use the Kadence theme, with the alternative wordpress theme it works, but obviously I cannot change the theme due to the work involved.
Thank you very much for your work and I hope you can help me. Greetings.

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Hi I believe it’s a theme issue and advise you to contact the support team of your theme to understand the issue.

If you want to be sure it’s a theme issue, activate any other WordPress default theme like Twenty Twenty-Two, you should see the registration form is displayed into this theme.

If not, then it’s probably another plugin conflicting with BuddyPress, deactivate each plugin one by one and when the registration form is back, you’ll have found the problematic plugin.

All this was written into this sticky topic…

@fanvid really nice post, in fact the best I’ve read so far IMO, you also said that elgg has image posting, where? The file plugin? Apart form having likes and hashtag support, it’s kindda the same. Plus the hard thing about elgg is their codding standards, very hard to implement stuff and to design a great theme, BP is way easier in that regard. Just my two cents about it.

I agree 100% that BP should start over, fresh. Don’t try to copy WordPress with the blocks and stuff, just release it with basic social features and make a plugin market right here only for BP.

Heyo everybody!

I think the issue with buddypress is the same it always had, you had 2 choices, make a rock solid basic social framework (like wordpress is for blogs) and then expand with plugins, or make a solid all in one product that can be extended with plugins, the problem is that buddypress was never one or the other, it was always a mix of the basic, with lots of holes in the feature set with some extended stuff that no one needs.

Besides that the basic social network features NEVER realized to this day, ive tried buddypress several times and its always lacking the most basic features that social networks all have as well as most competing social network software always has, but in buddypress its, oh no use this broken plugin and of course that breaks or its also janky, like the whole image posting on buddypress, its ridiculous and a broken system, im sure it has improved a lot over the years, but my impression comparing with something like wordpress, is that buddypress is always launching optimizations and improvements and never new features and never good social features… like im not a super fan of wordpress blocks, to this day its pretty broken to me but at least they are trying new things and making improvements, buddypress is stuck on myspace era social networks but doesnt even deliver on those…

You should install buddypress and get old school facebook, thats it, member pages, a feed you can tweak, make connections, post stuff… can buddypress do this? kinda? maybe? if you install some plugins… almost…

And to that point and i know some people on this tread went about lots of features they want, but look at your competition, tiktok, discord, reddit, they are not facebook with 1 billion features, they are way more streamlined and sometimes very simplistic social networks, personal page feed, main page feed thats pretty much it, you dont need a million features to have a great social network, but you need solid basics with as many points of interaction possible (share, text, images, videos, like, subscribe, swipe left, star, heart, join, chat, message) and even today buddypress lacks… lacks so much on the very basic social stuff.

Today, a basic vanila forum soft is more social and expandable than buddypress, its not that buddypress hasnt moved with the times, its that it never moved in the first place and im your market, i run a lot of sites, a lot of communities, small and large, lots of it on wordpress, if buddypress was good, not even great i would use it and i would extend it…

Now regarding the original news about the low usage of buddypress, im impressed you had that many, and im kinda on the side of hummm after this many years of meh, the only way i would try and care again about buddypress is if you completely revamped the whole thing, doesnt need to be what im talking about here, but you need to start from scratch, because what you build clearly is not working, optimizing this or improving that feature wont change my mind, just look at the 10.0 release changelog, its like… the same as a good maintenance release… but i dont think you can, because there are still 100k using it… so you are stuck… i would say drop those people, give it a year or two of life support and just start over…

And i dont think social networks are going away anytime soon, sure a lot of it moved for mobile, but that doesnt mean you cant run your mobile social app on wordpress/buddypress, i do, most of my sites are if not available on mobile, they do have some mobile integration, so buddypress could have lots of value, and it could be much more, but as of today im pretty sure it wont amount to anything, im your target audience, buddypress has pretty much burned all its bridges with me, like a lot of users, I posted here and on wordpress.org the issues, the recommendations, or views of whats wrong, and there were no replies or replies like this plugin solves it, or that’s how it works, i remember one of those comments got me mad enough that on that day i restarted one of my sites from buddypress to elgg, freaking elgg its an atrocious social network software, but it was still better than buddypress, at least it had the most basic social features, like posting a picture, i really don’t see anything coming from this, i hope im wrong but, well… look where i am writing this… this is the main buddypress site, it should be a showcase of a social network on wordpress, but no, we are all writing on bbpress, the only really social part of your entire site.

Hi everyone,

I am using an Uncode theme, Buddy Press Version 10.4.0 and WordPress 6.0.3. We’ve setup a Two empty pages ‘Register’ & ‘Activation’ and assigned them through the BuddyPress and it’s been working fine up until now. However, we can no longer see a Registration form and not sure what can be the issue, could you please help us solve this issue.

Thanks in advance.

How to add custom fields to the WordPress registration form ?

Hello, and thank you for all the great work!

I have been using WordPress for about 15 years. I started my first online community in 2008.
I then chose not to use Buddypress, because at the time it was fine with a forum. Facebook hadn’t invented its activity wall yet, and people didn’t expect too much.

Now in 2022 I am in the process of re-launching this old online community again, after it has been dead for a number of years. (Mostly because Facebook arrived)
Meanwhile, I’ve been using WordPress & Woocommerce a lot – last couple of years – with Gutenberg and Blocks. An absolutely fantastic solution to a lot of problems!

If you use WordPress, it’s because you can do something yourself, but you can’t do everything.

I was therefore really looking forward to getting started with Buddypress in relation to the relaunch I’m about to start, but I was a little disappointed when I saw that it is not at all possible to use gutenberg to style the absolutely required pages. For example Register, Profile, Members, Activity etc.

I think many who now use WordPress are people who want to own their own information, have 100% control, and to shape something themselves out of their own creativity. They may have some knowledge, but not always enough to do programming, or to go deep into css and theme design etc. They don’t have time for that either.

Gutenberg blocks are therefore the perfect bridge between those who know a LITTLE, but need the help of software to do the rest, and who want to create something quickly.
I think there are many of us..

Wordpress scores highly here with blocks and easy solutions.

You can now use Kadence Theme + Gutenberg blocks to create almost anything you want.

I’m not a programmer myself, but I own a couple of companies. Much of the joy is being able to create something, see it being used, make it work – and I can do that by using blocks.

I’ve gone back and forth between Buddypress and Buddyboss, after I realized that Buddypress doesn’t yet have this functionality and tried to think what I really want.
With Buddyboss, I get a great theme, and it has all the functionality I need – but I’m completely locked into just that. Also, I’m not very impressed with companies that take credit for a product that was originally created by someone else. That is why I prefer to use Buddypress, and I also see Buddypress as the authority here.

I think you Buddypress developers will be able to deliver something more in the future, than what I expect from a company working with a product not originally made by themselves.

But still I see it difficult using Buddypress as it would turn out to be much more expensive, since I have to contact someone at upWork to do it the way I want it.
To many people it would be more logical to pay a couple of hundred dollars to be able to start tomorrow.

So my contribution to the discussion is perhaps not a secret: Make buddypress elements ready to use as blocks. And make sure to market it as a “point and click system with Gutenberg”

Additionally, specifically for my online community, I will need:
– Forums
– Private messaging
– Notification system
– Nice looking user profiles
– Speedy site
– Friends
– Follow friends
– Moderation system for both community and forums.