BuddyPress.org

Hi all,

I plan on writing an official “thank you” post to the buddypress crew here in a week or so, but figured I would kick it off here on the forums. So… let me say THANK YOU to the guys/gals working so hard on the code and everything under-the-hood here at Buddypress.

During the next week my company will begin to move our entire Ning social network onto the buddypress platform. Our Ning site has 88,000 member so we’ve run into a LOT of challenges and a move of this size has in no way been easy.

First, we had to heavily modify our wordpress theme for buddypress (this took about two months). On top of that, we’re running a network of “sites” on the same site, under their own domains that function as news blogs within the network. So we heavily modified all of those themes as well.

Fortunately we had a smaller Ning network of 6,000 or so users that we were able to import in first and try to work out some kinks before going towards the larger network. We were able to work out a lot of the bugs through that process, but ran into a lot more over the past 48 hours while trying to import the larger Ning file.

In short, we’ve got a painful couple of months ahead of us to make all of this work, but we’re ready to switch the domain within the next 24 hours and dig in to do what we can with it. Buddypress is without question the best open source solution for this type of a move.

That said, for anyone else looking to move a sizable community from Ning to BP, it’s not easy. And without heavy modifications you aren’t going to get what you had in Ning.

Biggest Pros:
-Ability to use Multisites to provide users with sub-domains and full scale WP blogs
-Far more customizable design and layouts due to full control over content
-Ability to use domain mapping to wrap external news blogs into the network backbone (essentially creating a true network)

Biggest Cons:
-We lost the ability to for admins to “share” content with entire network
-We lost the ability for admins to message entire network
-We lost most of the user generated content across the Ning network and could not bring it over
-We’re forced into an environment where users must learn a new method of discussion (traditional method is gone in favor of group based discussions)

I could go on and on and I probably will in my official thank you post. In the meantime I would love to provide a glimpse into the Beta site if anyone cares to see it. I would prefer not post it in public but will send via IM.

Again, thanks to the BP community for such an incredibly powerful utility. We’re confident our new network will rival the best of the best in the BP/WP world and we’re excited to share it with all of you when it goes live!

-Eric