BuddyPress.org

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.

Soory, I am lost.

You just need to create new pages and paste [shortcode] in your pages.

I “just need to” is perfect wording w/o contend. When I create a new page in WordPress and add shortcode the published page will display the shortcode, i.e. [bbp-register].

No help here?

Mobile app.

Browser only websites are dying, slowly. Can you imagine discord, telegram etc without a mobile app?

I am working on a wordpress theme that focuses on being a bridge for headless wordpress + https://quasar.dev

I believe BuddyPress can be ground breaking for any mobile app that built with WordPress.

How to Turn WordPress Site Into a Social Network ?

Thanks for the reply @imath. I was simply implying to look and see what they are doing – SOME of what they are doing I think fits into general interest (look at how they deal with media). They are doing research and it would be foolish to ignore some parts, even if it in the end it leads to ways we can mold it more toward BuddyPress thinking.

Sometimes you can lead my example, other times you can lead by taking something and making it better in some way.

There’s a balance with addons – too many and a user can get overwhelmed with choices and research but overall I lean toward simple as possible. Perhaps it’s something that is simple for a niche purpuse that uses BuddyPress “under the hood”. It’s not a great example but thinking about “how can I spin up a special kind of to-do app that I can add my friends and share and collab with, while still owning my data, control, etc”. Thought of this today while my kid was showing me what she does in Notion today.

Ok, so if the WordPress repo is our advantage – then how do we use that advantage? how do we stand out (from member sites and other social plugins)? how do we feature BB plugins that are trust worthy and maintainable that avoid people having to dive into thousands of plugins in this “important advantage”? Good questions, looking forward to hearing more from people about them.

I don’t believe BuddyPress is missing THAT many features. Part of this is also changing with the times. Which means maybe thinking a little differently – even if it’s me thinking differently from how I look at BuddyPress when I started with it so many years ago. ☮️

BTW: I tried to send you a detailed request via your website, but there’s a bug in your “Contact Me” function. When I try to submit the message, I get an error saying “Could not verify the reCaptcha response.” But there is no reCaptcha function!

Here’s the request I tried to send:
“Hello! We are using the Formidable Forms plugin to generate surveys and reports. The reports are group-specific, so we need to attach the user’s group ID to the survey data.

Formidable Forms has no integration with BuddyPress, but they can access the WordPress user profile metadata.

Can I hire you to write a routine that would copy the current user’s group ID from the BuddyPress tables into their WP user profile metadata?

I don’t have much money, so I’m hoping this wouldn’t be too complicated. Thanks!”

I might be too close to BuddyPress since using it since the 0.1 days (yes, that version is right). I do agree more with the comments so far about the “product fit” and some of that “vibe” feels like some people talking about where WordPress itself (which BP relies on) although I feel WordPress still fills many holes and has a long life to it. But there are two factors I consider to be competitors that offer attractive, “modern/hip”, and easier (in same cases) solutions:

– TikTok, Instagram, etc. social networks – the trend of posting content OUTSIDE your site and not truly 100% owning it. These are the “Wix” and “Medium” versions that WordPress exists with. They are easier to setup and the social mass effect can’t be beat. It would be neat though to have a BP-lite that could setup a TikTok like video sharing network (perhaps that could intergrate with 3rd parties). I’m not sure if there’s a “build this feature and it will help big” here, since if a user or client wants to use them you can’t stop them. But appeal maybe to the niche (which BuddyPress has always done well) and the customizers out there that maybe want something like them, or something that has a slimed down feature set with an attractive new theme/look.

– BuddyBoss. Surprised this hasn’t been brought up. Look at what they are doing in terms of features. The past few freelance projects that the cilents could have used BuddyPress on for new projects, they went and paid for BuddyBoss. My observations has been because of the (1) marketing, (2) features, and (3) continued support (the mobile app also maybe played a part although I’ve heard disappointing experiences about that). I know some don’t like BuddyBoss because they’ve forked BP and (as far as I know) really haven’t contributed anything back (GPL, open source, etc.) But if you’re looking for features, look at what this for-profit company is doing (big and small) because logically they are likely listening to their base and current customers and their actions and focus might be some input.

I do support a BuddyCamp (I used to have a BuddyCamp Miami way back… in 2010 I think?).

Some good BuddyPress plugins have been difficult to recommend because of their maintenance or lack thereof, with no fault to the authors. But BuddyPress always needs SOME plugins when being used for projects. Might be also nice for other plugin companies (say Yoast?) to promote their BuddyPress support.

I would love to see a new theme but not sure yet what direction to offer further $0.02 on that.

No real comments from a coding perspective – there are developers here with more experience in that. A “BuddyPress lite” plugin if you’re talking about “restarting from another plugin” might be worth some discussion. Imagine just spending 5 minutes with a few clicks and you have your own private, secure social network just for your friends/family. Simple. Easy. Modern looking, works with modern tech, etc.

Before diving into technical or feature suggestions since as a developer I’m automatically wired to go via that route, I thought about asking non-technical people about the product, BuddyPress, itself.

I recently participated in the WordCamp US and had the chance of talking to a few people, besides conversations I had online (Slack, etc). I think the overall feedback I gathered is that BuddyPress needs to find its product-market fit.

## Product-market Fit

The overall argument is that BuddyPress made sense when it was created because organizations needed a unique social network. Nowadays this is easily solvable with other tools that weren’t available at the time like Slack, Discord, Telegram, Facebook Groups, etc.

It’s much easier now to create social communities/networks using those tools than using BuddyPress. So as a project, we are not only competing against other open source projects but also with big companies which provide a solution to this problem in a much better way.

So far, all the conversation I’ve read about this issue sort of understands this new reality but the solutions presented miss this important point. So finding a new “place” for BuddyPress in this new scenario might actually be the most important thing we can do and that will define how we spend our resources going forward.

## BuddyPress’ problems

### Complexity

Before I became a BuddyPress contributor, I used to build small communities for clients. One of the first things I noticed about this niche was that all communities were the same but different. There was always a small tweak or a small feature on top of an existing component needed. BuddyPress was perfect for business. Clients didn’t know how to do it, so they hired me to build or extend it for them.

Even to this day, I still think BuddyPress suffers from this “problem”. If you are not a developer, BP is too hard to change. In BuddyPress’ marketing, it sells itself as flexible software, which is, but only if you are a developer extending or building something on top of it. Not to the regular users that install or try to use it.

I think this is an area where other tools thrive in comparison. People don’t usually build social networks with BuddyPress because it is open source. That also includes WordPress. They use WordPress because it is easy, a good solution for a problem at hand: “how do I make my own dam website?”.

Quoting feedback I got recently:

Every good product is a tool that helps people execute their creative vision, saves them time on boring tasks, or entertains in some way.

On top of that, BuddyPress is still considered expensive to many, be that due to the need to hire developers, to buy themes and plugins to accomplish their creative vision.

### Feature Set

I think BuddyPress has a strong foundation of features to create a social community. But as mentioned before, users are trying to execute this creative vision, so there is always something more needed.

This is an area where BuddyPress lacks as a project and in extensions (plugins that add features to BuddyPress) as well.

The most emblematic examples are the Follow Feature and the Media component. The first one because it is so basic in the land of social networks. And the latter in the lands of Instagram and photo apps. But the core BuddyPress plugin lacks both.

On top of that, features/components are pretty hard to integrate or extend as mentioned. Whereas other tools, provide an almost seamless experience, a rich set of features in a Jetpack-like style where you only need the click of a button to get something working and showing in the default theme.

### Conservatism

Here speaking as a contributor and observer of both WordPress and BuddyPress.

BuddyPress is still too conservative when it comes to changes or new features, however small they are. There seems to be a philosophy or approach that it’s practiced not against change but I’d argue that it is an almost “orthodoxical” concern to changes and new features which in my opinion is impeding the project to evolve.

A recent example was the introduction of PHPCS support which to me it would be considered a no-brainer but that it took more time to convince than I anticipated or expected.

And this is also an overall theme with BuddyPress. I see a willingness of the project to experiment and a desire to evolve but we still move at a very slow pace (even in the heyday of the project).

There is a “desire” to change and evolve but over years I also see a hesitation which “drags” the project a little bit.

### Low number of contributors

BuddyPress has been suffering from a low number of contributors in recent years. The reasons for that could be varied. It is also not clear if that’s actually a big problem for the project. I’d argue that it is not that big.

But it is clear that identifying what’s turning possible contributors away is a very good first step. And what we can do to revert that.

## Finally, some suggestions for the project

### Decide on a product market fit

This should have a high priority. Whatever we decide here will dictate how resources will be spent. What features will be built. What areas will have the most attention. IMO, this might be the most consequential decision for the future of the project.

### Improve the feature set

As mentioned previously, basic features of a social network are still missing in BuddyPress. Privacy, social networking, and following features are all missing. In the past, the argument I’ve always heard/read was that those features were better off served by plugins. Whereas users would be more likely to expect them inside the core plugin.

So I think BuddyPress needs a more complete set of social networking features. And that those features should be more integrated with each other and other parts of the site.

h3. Improve the project’s marketing

I think we need to do a better job of marketing what we offer. Not only look and feel but also of presenting information to the user.

–

That’s it! Not a lot of suggestions but I’m purposefully not adding technical suggestions to the project because I feel this is secondary. As long as we do not get into a new product market fit, we might not be addressing the real issue of the project.

=)

Even better would be if that data is in the WordPress user meta data. We’re trying to access it via a hidden field in a Formidable Forms survey.

Deep admin integration for all core components and logged-in Members – show me my activity in my User Profile, etc…

A default set of universally wrappable theme-side template parts for one-line-of-code integration into any WordPress theme/builder/blocks, that ultimately outputs what equates to a self-hosted Tumblr clone.

@kerchmcc, @sub0810, @maryreyes:

Just wanted to make sure you saw the latest developments (the bbPress thread just above).

I’ve also updated the bbPress Track ticket with the suggested code. I don’t feel competent to say that it’s correct, but it appeared to work on my test site:

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3454#comment:2

Hopefully someone who really understands these things will take a look at the ticket!

Mike